


if you will come all the way down with me

by katadesmoi



Series: old songs [2]
Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Missing Scene, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, also Demeter is there, also its not necessary at all to have read the first fic in this series, finally putting my classics major to good use :), i just like having everything together for posterity, i love these bastards so much, this is just a really long exploration of this trainwreck of a marriage, weird mix of broadway and london and nytw lyrics/characterisations all throughout lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-26 21:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20396410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katadesmoi/pseuds/katadesmoi
Summary: There is a tension in the air like the first raindrops steaming off the bitumen, on the brink of a summer storm: the sky holding its breath. Her husband says, "You keep comin' back. Every time I think I've finally cut the tether, you're there again."Maybe, just maybe, everything that falls down eventually rises.





	1. hymn to demeter

**Author's Note:**

> Much of this was heavily inspired by the album Tallahassee (2002) by the Mountain Goats. It's about divorce and if u ever want to get emotional about hades and persephone in this musical I would recommend giving it a listen I love it very much. the title of this fic is from the song Old College Try off the album  
Anyway I'm utterly enchanted by Road to Hell II and this musical's acknowledgment of its own nature as a story and a re-telling of a much older myth, so that idea features heavily in here! 
> 
> Tw for heavy alcohol use on Persephone's part in later chapters. Also tw for brief discussion of the original persephone myth.

Summer reaches its fever pitch that year with a sense of foreboding. The orchard swells. Rotted fruit scatters the grass beneath the trees, sweet yellow flesh rotting where the birds have torn them open like Tityos' guts. Demeter, the Old Woman of the Harvest, looks out at the reddening evening sky with a scowl, and slams the screen door shut against the flies.

"What is it, ma?" Miss Persephone asks, seated at the kitchen table with reeds for a basket bent between her fingers.

"Nothing," the Old Woman of the Harvest mutters. But she can feel it in her bones: the whole story's starting again.

Here is how it goes: the Old Woman of the Harvest opens her door to find a boy smeared in coal dust. Hat scrunched in his fist, a bouquet of wildflowers in his other hand. And the same dark eyes that she's seen on every one of the Hospitable One's past faces. Dark and colourless like the black waters of the Styx.

"Ma'am," says Aidoneus, Theon Chthonios, giver of wealth who binds all equally, Hades Polydegmon who is host of all. "I hope it ain't too forward of me to ask, but I thought it only proper I do. I'd like permission to court your daughter."

The story has folded in on itself.

"You. Out," the Old Woman of the Harvest tells her daughter, shooing her from the kitchen table. "I need a word with this young man. In _private_."

"Ma," Miss Persephone pleads, and Demeter can see her exchanging a look with the boy over her shoulder. The two ain't subtle in the slightest; they already know each other.

"Out," Demeter repeats, lifting the half-finished basket and shoving it into her daughter's hands. Persephone swallows, and then darts from the room. Demeter turns to the Hospitable One, and gestures sharply to the empty chair. "Sit."

He does.

The Old Woman of the Harvest sets a pitcher of water on the table with a sharp thud. Then she takes a seat opposite the boy. She nods to the vase. "That's for them flowers."

"Thank you," the boy says, carefully placing the bouquet in the water. He clears his throat. "Ma'am, I hope I haven't caused you offence just now."

"What makes you say that?" the Old Woman of the Harvest asks.

"Plainly speaking, ma'am, your manner ain't the friendliest reception a prospective suitor could hope for," young Mister Hades says. There is the slightest hint of wryness in his tone.

"And ain't I permitted a little unfriendliness towards a man such as yourself?" Demeter says. Her tone is quiet, but each word is sharpened to a fine point. "As I recall, you weren't nearly so concerned with permission in past lifetimes."

Confusion flashes across his face for a moment. And then a kind of anguish creases his brow. He leans back in the chair and shuts his eyes, like he's remembering a dream. Divinity is like that: slips from your grasp the moment you go looking for it. If he remembers who he was before this, he won't remember much. Just the barest flashes. The last vestiges of his godhead lingering like a phantom limb.

"I can't expect your forgiveness, ma'am. But I'll ask it anyway," young Mister Hades says softly. "I swear I don't mean nothing dishonourable upon your daughter."

They both remember how the story went. How it started, with young Miss Persephone snatched from green fields, and those six pomegranate seeds, honey-sweet and red as bloodied flesh. Perhaps it is a different story, this time. Perhaps this boy, though he has Hades’ eyes, ain’t the monster who stole a girl from her ma a lifetime ago.

The Old Woman of the Harvest ought to harden her heart against a man who’s hurt her girl like that. But she watches this boy, hat scrunched in his hands, coal dust in the lines of his face, and she don’t see that ancient god in him. It would be unfair to hold him to account for those crimes, not with the way he’s looking at those flowers in the vase like they’re all he could ever hope to hold.

A new story, then. Perhaps it will be a happier one, the Old Woman of the Harvest thinks, but even so she ain’t so sure. Tragedy has a way of finding her daughter wherever she walks.

"I give you my blessing," reverend Demeter says, thumbing the whorls in the woodwork. "On one condition. Do you swear to keep it?"

"Aye. I'll swear it."

"Do nothing to her that she won't allow. Do you understand? My blessing ain't worth a damn if you ain't got _her _permission first."

It is the best protection she can afford her daughter. It would be foolish to try keep Persephone from that man. Girl might be light and life but she's got a bit of the underground in her too. She crosses between the worlds of the dead and the living in the same way the sun between horizons: because she _must_. Because that is the way the world is, and has always been, and will always be.

"I swear," young Mister Hades says with earnest. Oh, he's in love. Plain as day, written all over that guileless face of his. If the weight of the old stories didn't press against her chest so, Demeter might have felt some joy, knowing her girl had a boy like that looking out for her.

Later, once she’s sent Mister Hades on his way, she speaks with her girl. Miss Persephone’s got a smudge of coal dust on her cheek, where Mister Hades must’ve kissed her before he went. Girl wears it shamelessly, with a grin like springtime sun.

“You watch out for that young man, you hear?” the Old Woman of the Harvest warns.

“Aye, ma,” Miss Persephone says, too giddy to really take proper notice of the warning. She bends the basket reeds beneath her callused fingers and hums a tune under her breath. Under and over, under and over.

“I mean it,” Demeter says sharply.

Miss Persephone finally looks up, and smiles. Says, like she’s placating an old woman who frets far too much, “I ain’t no fool, ma. I remember how it went the last time.”

They all remember, and still they hold out hope that maybe this time around, it’ll turn out. The Old Woman of the Harvest swallows her next words, because it’s been a long night and fret as she might, her daughter’s happy and perhaps that’s all a mother can ask for, in times like these. So, this is what she don’t say: fate makes fools of us all.

Young Mister Hades always walks Miss Persephone right to the front door at the end of the night. Arrives exactly two minutes before her curfew, never a moment later. He picks her fresh flowers. Never gives the Lady Demeter cause to complain, although that don’t stop her.

“Tracked dirt all through the damn house,” she grumbles, as Persephone hangs up her coat.

“He’s working the mines, ma. Can’t help it,” Persephone says patiently. There her girl goes, coal smudge on the cheek, humming that song under her breath. Stacking fresh peaches in a basket to share with her young man.

The courtship draws to a close with the end of the next summer: leaves crackling gold on the branches with the first vestiges of autumn. Persephone comes home singing, a ring glinting on her finger – how a poor boy afforded fine gold like that, Demeter ain’t to know.

(Listen close, I’ll give you a hint: Mister Hades got a good head for numbers, beneath that coal dust and grime. Puts down that pickaxe and picks up a fountain pen, and suddenly he’s got the world at his fingertips. Crunching numbers makes a better living than manual labour. He scrimps and he saves until he got enough to buy that fine gold ring, cause his lady don’t deserve a penny less spent on her.)

Courthouse wedding, quiet and unostentatious. Miss Persephone binds herself to the underworld with a contract, not pomegranate seeds. Young Mister Hades scrubs up real nice when he puts on his good suit and cleans the mine from out under his nails. Miss Persephone's always got a bit of chaos about her, with blossoms all strewn through her hair, and her best dress ain't white (pale green like grass-stains), but her smile is radiant as sunlight on water.

There are two witnesses: grim-faced Old Woman of the Harvest, come to see her girl tie herself to the underground. And the young Mister Hermes, peaked cap pulled low over his brow, who shoots Mister Hades a mischievous smile from the public gallery. When the rings have been exchanged and the contract signed, the two witnesses watch the newlyweds leave arm-in-arm. There ain't a body on earth who'd want to spoil their joy, so Demeter keeps her voice low. "I don't like seeing her go with him."

"It'll turn out this time, missus," Mister Hermes tells her with the confidence of a young man who don't quite know the world yet. "I feel it in my bones."

There ain't a railroad track leading the way to hell yet. Just a dirt path, and the mouth of Orcus yawning wide. Persephone would be frightened, except for the warmth of her husband's hand on her arm. Mister Hades lifts his lantern high, and its warmth spills sluggishly into the gloom of the underworld's throat.

"Are you ready?" he asks.

She was ready for this the moment she found him in her garden. Perhaps even longer than that. She's always felt in her bones that the earth was drawing her in. She nods. "Aye. I'll walk with you."

And together, they step into the dark.

The underworld is an ancient place. Here is why Hades is called the Hospitable One: because in the end, he is host to _everyone_, down here in his deathly kingdom. The land of the dead is vast and unending and it is filled, from edge-to-edge, by the chattering dead.

That don’t make it unpleasant. They build their house in a cypress grove at the edge of the river. The air is cold and filled with the sound of the water rushing, and there is a gentle silence that sits over everything like a coating of dust on a mantlepiece. Lady Persephone stands at the riverbank and takes in the warm smell of earth all around them.

“It ain’t the liveliest of places,” Mister Hades says, like an apology.

“I don’t care,” Lady Persephone tells her husband, with complete sincerity. “I have you.”

Here is something magical: coming home to house that ain't empty.

Coming home to somebody waiting for you.

Mister Hades spends his whole day, from the moment he rises from his bed to the moment he closes up the factory doors, looking forward to this. He hangs up his hat and his coat at the door and traces the sound of music into the kitchen. The warmth of the oven, the gas stove-top whistling away to itself, and Persephone, baking bread and singing along with that old record player perched haphazardly on the counter. Her hair tumbling from its updo and springing down around her shoulders, her fingers and apron smeared in flour. She turns to flash him a delighted smile.

"I'm making bread," she says proudly, like he hasn't already figured it out. "It's my ma's recipe."

Mister Hades presses a kiss to the top of his wife's head and says, "Don't mistake this for complaint, love, but I hadn't taken you for someone much interested in domesticity."

"Oh, don't you worry. This ain't gonna happen on the regular," she says with a grin, kneading the dough with one hand. "Just missin' my ma's cooking is all."

"Do you need any help?" Mister Hades asks.

Persephone snorts. "Go change out of your fancy suit first, mister."

Here is something magical: evening lowlight, the sound of the river, playing dominoes and splitting fragrant fresh-baked bread between your fingers.

There's something fantastically _real _about things you make with your own hands, Mister Hades thinks to himself, tasting the notes of allspice, the golden crust, the linseeds scattered through the dough. Like giving something back to the world.

"It's your turn," Persephone says, and she's smirking in the way she does when she _knows _she's gonna win this round.

Mister Hades frowns at the game-pieces snaking across the table, those cogs in his brain turning slow and steady. He selects a piece and carefully places it down. Takes a moment to straighten it carefully.

"I win," Persephone says, setting down her final piece with a satisfied _snap. _

"Again," Mister Hades says. For her sake, he makes an effort to look put out, although in truth he don't much care for the game. She could beat him at it every day for the rest of time and he would still sit down to play the next round - because it would be with _her_.

"What's on your mind?" Persephone asks, steepling her fingers beneath her chin. Her eyes sparkle. "You look like you're contemplatin' something."

"Just tryna work out how you beat me this time," Mister Hades lies, because he ain't enough of a sap to proper articulate the particular brand of sentimentality he's feeling tonight. Ain't got the words for the way he's feeling anyhow. Love's the best word for it, but it don't quite capture all of it. It's like his whole world is this room and this table and this woman. The rest could vanish and he'd never once miss it.

“Square up, mister, ‘cause I’m about to do it again,” his wife says with a wicked smile. Knocks back her drink and sweeps up the dominoes, and in the lamplight her dark hair’s all lit with threads of gold and her wedding ring flashes on her finger. That’s something magical right there, Mister Hades thinks: that this woman let him marry her.

Everything is hard the first time. There is no railroad track, so Mister Hades walks his lady all the way up to the world of the living. He is quiet the whole way. Persephone keeps thinking of things to say, and then letting them drift by unspoken. She's afraid to speak, because it might mean admitting that she's been looking forward to this, just a little. Looking forward to the sunshine, to the birdsong, to the cicada-screech and the taste of fresh fruit. Most of all to her ma's embrace. Persephone ain't the most sensitive of souls, but even she's got enough sense in her to figure that might hurt her husband's feelings a little.

Winter is a frightening thing. Here is the world stripped of life, laid bare and barren and freezing as the dry bones of a carcass on the beach. But the cold peels back as Persephone steps out of Orcus' mouth. Snow melts around her feet. The trees shiver and begin to bud, hesitantly, in the warming air.

A few steps out of the cave, Mister Hades tugs at her arm. "This is as far as I go," he says gruffly. Like he's holding back a swell of emotion.

Persephone turns back to face him. She swallows a sudden lump in her throat. Takes his hand in hers and traces the rough edges of his palms, trying to summon the right words. "I wish you could come with me."

"We both got our duties," he says.

"That don't make this easier," she murmurs.

He says nothing to that. Just takes her hand and brings it up to his lips. Kisses her knuckles tenderly, and then smiles sadly. "I'll be back here in six months," he says, letting go of her hand.

"Don't be late," Persephone says. And she watches him disappear back into Orcus' mouth before she turns back to face the sky.

You can trace the path from the underworld to the Old Woman of the Harvest's home, because Persephone trails springtime behind her as she goes. By the time she reaches the old bungalow, her breath has stopped clouding the air, and the ground don't slip with snowmelt under her feet. She clambers up the steps and knocks twice.

The door rattles as her ma fiddles with the locks. Demeter pulls it open and stills in the doorway, staring at her daughter like she don't believe her own eyes. "Good god, you ain't telling me it's spring already?”

"Yeah, ma. It is," Persephone says with a sudden rush of emotion. She steps forward and crushes her mother into a hug, buries her face in her mother's dark hair. Demeter holds her tight, the two women locked in embrace over the threshold. When her ma finally extracts herself from the hug, Persephone realises there are tears streaking her cheeks.

"Well, come in, girl. I'm letting all the warmth out with the door hanging open like this," Demeter grumbles, wiping her eyes.

Her ma sits her down at the kitchen counter, sets down a plate of sweet rolled-oat biscuits and a glass of water. Taste of home-cooking makes Persephone feel like a girl again. She wants to say something to fill in the silence, but she ain’t got the right words.

“He treat you alright down there?” Demeter finally says, once she’s got the kettle boiling.

“Aye, ma,” Persephone says patiently. 

“And you had no trouble coming back?”

“He walked me right to the world’s throat,” Persephone says. “Ma, you saw me sign the contract. Did you really think I wouldn’t return?”

"Your man wasn't too keen on letting you go the last time,” Demeter says pointedly. The kettle whistles, and she swiftly unhooks it to pour the scalding water into her tea.

"It's different now. You know that.”

Demeter shoots her a look. "You can't trust him."

"He ain't that man, ma," Persephone says.

"He will be," Lady Demeter says.

Persephone sets down her plate and goes to her mother. Wraps her arms around her and buries her face in Demeter’s shirt. Demeter takes a deep breath and holds her close.

"He's different this time," Persephone murmurs.

"How do you know? How do I know he'll let you go?"

Persephone shuts her eyes. Blinks back tears, even though she ain't quite sure what's prompting them. She says, "Oh, ma. I'll always come back to you. Every time."

Mister Hades ain’t the sort of man typically prone to anxiousness, but his mind makes an exception when it comes to Lady Persephone. That woman does something to him and he ain’t able to articulate it in the slightest. All he knows is that the weeks leading up to autumn have got him in a wretched state of restlessness, waiting for her. Like a dog tugging on its lead.

To ease his mind he puts himself to work. He don’t spend much time labouring with his hands like he used to, these days, stuck up in that office of his doing the accounts and orders and the rest. But there’s a scrap of land behind the house that right now looks like a mighty fine spot for a garden. His lady will like it, he’s certain: a little patch of life that might make her miss the sun a little less.

He grabs a couple of able men, and they carve out that little plot. The calluses on his hands are soft, now, but he can still stack the bricks well enough. He spends a fortune bribing that young Mister Hermes to fetch him fresh seeds from up top. Pours his whole heart into that dark earth.

Autumn finally arrives, and Mister Hades makes the long walk up top to fetch his lady. When they return, the first thing he shows her is that garden. Fresh-tilled black earth, seeds waiting to be sown. She grips his hand tightly and says, “You made this for me?”

“Aye. It’s yours,” he says, and he’d be a right liar if he said his heart didn’t swell at the little hitch of emotion in her voice. She loves it, truly. That’s his whole world, right there in that moment.

She spends so long out there with her hands in the dirt that when she finally comes in before dinner she’s still covered in it. And then she laughs at herself, because not so long ago it'd been Mister Hades who'd been coming home with the underground all over him, fresh off his shift in the mines. Now that he sits in his office and pours over the ledgers all day, his wife's the one muddying the bathwater.

There is peculiar joy in seeing flowers bloom in a place they should not. Lady Persephone fosters life in this dead land with that same vicious tenacity she takes to everything. Mister Hades might not be able to give his wife the sunshine, but, he thinks, perhaps this might be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! comments are always always appreciated. Come find me on tumblr @odyssaeus for (1) weirdly aggressive classics opinions, (2) mediocre hadestown fanart and (3) just a bunch aesthetic bullshit :)
> 
> Fun classics fact: in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 9 (the oldest and most complete retelling of persephone's abduction we have) Hades is usually called Πολυδέγμων (Polydegmon) which literally means Host of Many or Host of All but Loeb translates it as The Hospitable One which sounds way fucking cooler


	2. lady strife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening: Game Shows Touch Our Lives, Southwood Plantation Road, Have To Explode by the Mountain Goats :,-)  
Tw for persephone's alcohol use

When strife comes, she comes quietly, on feather-light feet. Crawls into their household and lurks, squat and silent, in the dark places they do not reach for. And there she waits, until they call for her.

First up, Mister Hades: exhaustion makes him irritable. and he’s plenty exhausted, these days. Don’t need a pickaxe in his hand to see to it, either. Paper crease under his fingers, the glare of them electric lights, eyes pricking with the weight of the long day. But death don’t stop for anyone, even kings. File the names, check the ledgers. A single cabinet dedicated to Elysium, rarely opened. A whole wall for Asphodel, and the railings on the drawers are starting to scrape from being heaved open and shut day after day.

And that’s only the incoming dead. He’s got his employees to worry about: new recruits and contracts and applications for pay raises. There’s the mine (safety inspection coming up, better check them elevator cables for rust) and the foundry (got some new casts coming in from up top) and the factories (oughta organise another night shift so they can get all the orders done on time). He’s been working on plans for a railway, gotta negotiate with Mister Hephaistos for the engine patents (gotta draw up the figures and the budgets for that too). The list seems to get longer every moment he spends away from his desk.

So when Mister Hades comes home, you might forgive him for being a little pre-occupied. Oughta have some patience for his exhaustion. It makes him poor company, even more laconic than usual. Irritable, short-fused. Open wire might catch if you set the wrong spark near it.

Next up, Persephone: Lady Strife goes crawling in and before you know it, Persephone’s got a case of ennui strong enough to send her spiralling. She loves the garden and she loves their little house and their quiet evenings together but _good god _it ain’t gonna stave off the sheer _boredom _of the underground for another moment. She comes down her for her husband, and he spends the whole time locked in that office of his. It’s like he’d prefer the company of those damned ledgers to that of his wife.

Persephone tries to shake them thoughts off. Busies herself with her garden, pruning and sowing and replanting and digging in that dark earth. Working with her hands is enough to keep Strife at bay, if only for a moment. And when she ain’t working, she finds some other company to fill in the time.

Either fills the hours with Hekate, thrice-formed Lady of the Wayside (named so for her three faces: bride, divorcee, and widow, though wise souls don’t ask about her husband), who’s plenty good company if you don’t mind her hounds tearing the place up. Or with Mister Hermes, who starts to visit too, in his spiffy new suit. Silver like mercury, matching his smile.

“What’s with the outfit?” Persephone had asked when he first turned up.

"Mister Hades got a new gig for me. Lotta souls comin' down who don't got a clue which way to go," Mister Hermes explains, giving a deft twirl to show off the outfit. Fabric shines like moonlight on a river. "I'm a genuine psychopompos now, baby!"

Far cry from his usual calling of guiding travellers up top, but Persephone sees how it might suit the kid. God of wanderers and thieves, still guiding travellers all the way to the very end of the road. And if she feels a little put out that her husband’s talking to their cousin here but not his own wife, well, she does her best to forget it.

And finally, there are the Fates. Calling them _company _might be a bit of a stretch, owing the discomfort of their presence, but Persephone will take what conversation she can get, while her husband’s out working himself to the bone.

“Fancy a drink?” Lakhesis says with a horrible grin, making herself comfortable at the kitchen counter. Klotho and Atropos prowl about the place, inspecting every loose paper and old photograph with interest. Klotho plucks some calla lilies from a vase, shaking the water off the stems. Droplets fall across the table.

“It ain’t even midday yet,” Persephone snaps, folding her arms over her chest and glowering.

“No such thing as day or night in a place with no sun,” Lakhesis says slyly.

“Oh, leave her be,” Atropos says with a wave of her hand, slinking to Persephone’s side and lacing an arm around her shoulders. “She’s got a fair few years before it gets to that.”

“Gets to what?” Persephone demands.

“Mm, don’t you worry yourself over that, sister,” Klotho says airily.

Those word ain’t any comfort. Here’s the thing with a new story: Persephone’s going in to this blind. It could end happy, or not. The ominous smiles the Fates are wearing, though, those are speaking to the latter.

“You’re letting them get in your head,” Hekate tells her later, when Persephone recounts the story to her. Divorcee today, in that sharp grey suit meant for the courthouse. “What will happen will happen, and there ain’t a thing you can do except watch the story play out.”

Easy for a goddess like Hekate to say. She ain’t bound up in it like Persephone is, with plenty of threads for the Fates to pull at and unravel as they please. And what crime is it to want a happy ending, anyhow? Persephone can’t do a thing about the doubt settling cold her stomach, that choosing this place might have been a mistake. That her husband, for all she loves him, might lead her down a path she don’t want to go.

Like I said, Lady Strife’s a quiet girl, but she got ‘em both good.

Persephone takes matters into her own hands. Pulls on her hat and coat and makes that walk down to Mister Hades’ offices, through the copse of cypress trees and into the steady-growing cluster of buildings that is Hadestown. Down by their house, the sound of the river drowns out the tap-tap-tap of the pickaxes and the rumble of engines, but it grows steady and loud as she approaches. The road is lit by flickering electric lamps. The dead drift along it, murmuring an unearthly song between themselves, smeared dark with coal dust, pickaxes dusting dirt around their feet. They part swiftly as she steps forward, making way for the boss man’s wife. She don’t come here often, but they still know her on sight.

She is intercepted right at the doors, by three women in crisp dark suits. Elegantly cuffed sleeves reveal serpentine gold bracelets coiling at their wrists. Slick snake-skin heels. Hair pulled back into severe French rolls at the back of their heads. They are clearly sisters: the same dark hair, the same feverish bright eyes and wide smiles. Lips pulled back over bared teeth.

Alekto, Megaira, and Tisiphone: the Furies. In-house legal advice, her husband had said – someone’s gotta draw up the contracts. Their presence sets Persephone's skin buzzing, like the disturbing click and snap of static on flesh.

"Good afternoon, ma’am," Alekto says. "It's been a while."

"Eumenides," Persephone says by way of greeting, very much ironically. Here's a privilege of being Queen of the Underworld: you get to use the appropriate amount of sarcasm with a euphemism like _the Kindly Ones_. The Eumenides bristle at her tone. “I don’t suppose you know where my husband is?”

“He’s in a meeting right now. Can we take a message?” Megaira says.

Persephone glances over Megaira’s shoulder, to the great office doors beyond. Shut tight. She glowers. “Tell him it’s me.”

“Sorry, ma’am, but we can’t do that,” Megaira shrugs, though with that razor-thin smile she don’t look a bit apologetic.

“Important clients, see. Your man’s tryna build a railroad, and he can’t do it on his own,” Tisiphone explains, pushing her glasses up on her nose.

Alekto taps a long nail on her clipboard. “He’s meeting with Mister Hephaistos’ representative now. He was quite clear we weren’t to interrupt.”

Persephone exhales sharply in irritation. “It ain’t right. I’m his _wife_.”

“Ma’am, in that office, he’s a businessman first, husband second,” Alekto says.

Jesus. Persephone glowers at the closed doors, slouches back against the railing and taps her foot against the parquet floor. She was never a patient girl. Each minute feels more interminable than the last. Then the doors open. A reedy man in a grey suit steps out, followed by Mister Hades. Pinstripe suit. Black shoes slick and shining. Hair combed back. The two men shake hands. Mister Hades says, “I hope you’ll consider my offer, Kedalion.”

His voice is subterranean, without tenderness moderating it. And his smile is cold and reserved, lacking his usual wry humour. How strange it is, seeing someone you love put on a public face. How alien the false self they project for strangers is. Persephone feels an utterly irrational panic for a brief moment: _this is not my husband_.

But as the reedy man rummages in his briefcase, Mister Hades catches his wife’s eye and flashes her _real _smile. A beleaguered, can-you-believe-this-guy smile. Like her husband slipping out from behind the mask for a moment. And then it’s gone, as Mister Hades turns back to his client.

“The projections for the coming quarter are all here,” Kedalion says, handing Mister Hades a stack of papers. “I’ll talk to Mister Hephaistos and see if we can work something out. Expect my telegram in a few weeks.”

“Much obliged,” Mister Hades says. “I trust you can find your way out?”

“Of course.” Kedalion shoots a worried glance at the furies, and then disappears down the stairs.

There is a pause. Then Mister Hades turns to his wife and sighs. The mask falls away. “Sorry about that. I’ve had a hell of a month trying to wrangle that bastard into a deal. I think he’s finally come round to it.”

Persephone’s lips twist in amusement. “You’ve been busy.”

“Aye,” Mister Hades sighs. He reaches for his wife’s hand. “I know I ain’t been the most attentive these past weeks.”

“You could make it up to me now,” Persephone suggests slyly, stepping closer.

That makes him crack a proper smile, and he leans forward to press a kiss to her temple. The whiskers of his beard tickle against her cheekbone. He murmurs, “I could use a break.”

Lady Persephone hooks a finger around his tie and pulls him down into a full kiss, unable to keep from smiling against his lips.

“Sir, we have the drafts for the new standard form contracts done. You said you wanted to review the severance clause?” Alekto clears her throat. Heels and nails click-clacking on the parquet.

Mister Hades pulls back, leaving a draught in his wake. Persephone’s fingers unwind from his tie, helpless as he turns away from her. He looks between her and the Eumenides, torn.

“Go,” Persephone says roughly. “I’ll see you at home.”

He swallows, and squeezes her hand. “I might be late again. You don’t gotta wait up for me.”

“I don’t mind it,” Persephone says, even though it’s killing her. She pulls gently from his hold and turns to go.

“I love you,” her husband calls after her. But when she turns back to smile at him, he’s already disappearing back into his office.

The cycle seems quicker each time. Years slip by unnoticed amongst the routine. What had once seemed like an age was now no more than a heartbeat. But they keep a careful balance, him and her. The train carries Persephone back and forth, that metal beast and its steel tracks her constant companion between the underworld and the overworld. She is like the sun: dipping beneath the horizon and cresting over it again and again and again in that endless cycle.

Persephone rides the train. Hades works, and works, and works. The world turns.

And with every rotation, Strife’s grip winds a little tighter.

Anything to stave off the boredom. More to the point, anything to drag her husband out of that damn office. Persephone throws a party, a real fancy shindig, and invites every distant cousin and in-law as she can find addresses for.

And you’ve never seen anything like the party that Summer throws down here in the depths of the earth. Flowers garland every corner, fireflies alighting on the curling leaves. There is a jazz band, there are silver platters of delicate hors d’oeuvres, and there is a champagne flute in every hand. The black Stygian sky is fragrant with incense and the smell of roasting meat. Music crests through the air and drowns out the rush of the river.

Dionysos leans up against a cypress tree at the very edge of the garden, sipping champagne like it’s soda-pop. He drawls, “When I got an invite to a party in Hell, I hadn’t thought you meant that literally.”

“This ain’t Hell, brother, it’s Hadestown,” Persephone says. “And if I were you I’d take it easy on that drink.”

“And face the night sober?” Dionysos makes a horrified face, hand flying to his heart. His shirt, askew and falling off his shoulders, is dazzled with rhinestones, so that his every movement flashes and glitters like sunlight winking across glass windows. “This is a _lovely _little soiree, sister, but it could use a little more…excitement.”

“I’m sure you’ll take care of that,” Persephone says dryly.

“Oh, I will,” Dionysos says, with a wicked smile.

Persephone finds her husband seeking refuge at the food table, having a painful-looking conversation with his sister-in-law. Hera is wearing a dress trimmed in peacock fears, her dark hair curled carefully around her chin. Her shawl is so finely woven it looks as if it might pull apart like a cobweb.

“I see Mister Zeus didn’t make it,” Persephone says loudly, sweeping to her husband’s side and pressing a glass of bourbon into his hand. He shoots her a silent, grateful look.

Hera smiles tightly. “He sends his regards, but he was just _swamped_ with work this morning.”

“Oh, tell me about it. I practically had to drag mine out of his office,” Persephone says with a laugh, threading her arm through Hades’. “How are things up on Olympos?”

“Oh, the usual scandals and extramarital affairs,” Hera says, with forced levity, sipping her wine. “I’m sure your husband isn’t interested in such gossip.”

“Aye, spare me hearing about my brothers’ misdeeds, won’t you?” Hades says tiredly.

They are interrupted by the sound of glass shattering up on the portico, and then a loud laugh; unmistakeably Dionysos. Persephone sighs, ready to go do some damage control, but Hera stops her. “No, he’s my step-son. _I’ll _deal with this. You enjoy your time with your husband.”

And she makes a swift exit. Hades exhales audibly in relief. Persephone shoots him a look. “You ain’t gotta be quite so awkward, you know.”

Hades sips his bourbon and gives her a reproachful _I’m-trying-my-best _face. Persephone sighs, patting his arm and reaching for a canape. She takes a bite and offers the rest to him; he takes it with a little smile.

“You know I ain’t got the best of relationships with the rest of my family,” he says.

“I know, love. But it’s just one night, and your brothers ain’t even here,” Persephone says. “Try to relax.”

He nods, but his brow furrows. Watching her face carefully, like he’s trying to puzzle something out in that careful quiet way of his. “What’s this really about?”

Persephone forces a smile. “What’s _what _about?”

“This,” he says, gesturing around them at the party. Eloquent as always.

Persephone bites her lip. She ain’t about to admit to her husband how utterly bored out of her mind she’s been these last weeks. He don’t need that weighing on him. “I miss you,” she says carefully. “You spend all day at the office. I figured a fancy shindig like this might force you outta there for at least an hour or two.”

He looks down at his drink. That frown creasing deeper across his face. “You know how much work I got, love. Not just with them dead, but the railway too, and the mines, the whole rest of the business.”

“I know,” Persephone says. “But will it always be like this?”

“No,” he says quickly. “It’ll settle down, real soon. I can give you everything, and it’ll just be the two of us again.”

Persephone don’t know how to say it: she don’t need everything, she just needs _him_. Not years from now, not in some distant promised future. This is her life, right now, and she’s gonna go feral clawing at the walls if something don’t change real soon. But she don’t got the right words for it, so all she says is, “If you really hate talking to your in-laws that much you can go back to your work. God forbid I drag you away from your ledgers for more than an hour.”

Her sour tone surprises them both. Hades considers her wordlessly. For a moment, it seems like he might say something else – but then he tips back the rest of his drink and sets it down on the table. She lets go of his arm, and he mumbles, “Good night.”

“Night,” she echoes, watching him go. A waiter passes with a tray of champagne, and she snatches up a glass with light fingers. She drinks it far too quickly.

Later, she finds herself collapsing into a chair opposite Hera. The Lady of the Golden Throne is a couple of drinks in already, her glass pooling with faint cherry-red dregs of wine at the bottom. She puffs cigarette smoke into the air and flashes Persephone a humourless grin. “Your man finally make his escape?

“Aye.” Persephone coughs. “Say, sister, you wanna put that out? I ain’t good with bad air.”

Hera’s lips twist in amusement. She stubs it out on her plate. A wisp of smoke plumes up from the ashes. Embers winking in the grey. “I forgot how much like your ma you are.”

“I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or an insult,” Persephone grumbles.

“It’s both, sweetheart,” Hera says, tipping back her glass. She summons a waiter with another wave of her hand and tells him, “Get us more wine, will you?”

“Not sure that’s a good idea,” Persephone says.

“Of course it isn’t. That’s the whole _point_,” Hera deadpans. The waiter reappears, tray in hand, and Hera places the two glasses in front of her. “I can tell you got something on your mind, but this is a party, for God’s sake. You oughta enjoy yourself.”

Persephone takes the glass and swirls the wine inside it. “A little hard to do that when I know my man’s holed up in his office.”

“What the hell do you need _him _to have fun for?” Hera snorts.

“Might surprise you to learn that some people actually _like _their spouses,” Persephone snaps.

She’s struck a nerve, by the way Hera’s smile drops. Her manicured fingers curl around the wine glass, and she takes a long draught. Persephone swallows, feeling a little pang of guilt.

“I’m sorry. That was a wretched thing of me to say,” Persephone says.

“Aye, it was,” Hera says bitterly. Another ghost of a smile tugs across her face. “But you got a point there, darling. Ain’t right of me to project my own marital troubles onto you.”

Lady Hera can be a little abrasive round the edges, but she got a good heart. It’s wasted on a man like Mister Zeus, that’s for certain. For the goddess of marriage, she’s a woman dangerously close to filing for a divorce.

“To bad choices, then,” Persephone says dryly, raising her glass.

“To bad choices,” Hera echoes, with a bitter smile. And both women fling back that wine like they’re trying to drown themselves.

Mister Hades loves his wife. Don’t let yourself doubt that for a moment. A prudent soul might then wonder, why the hell is he so bent on working himself to the bone until he don’t got time to spend with her no more? I'll be straight with you and set it out, nice and clear. Watch: Lady Persephone leaves every year for the spring and the summer. Six months. It's her duty to the living, like Mister Hades' duty to the dead.

But listen close, and you'll hear the anxieties gnawing in the back of his mind: _she leaves because you ain't enough for her. _

He ain't enough on his own, so Mister Hades, being an enterprising sort of fellow, feels he oughta supplement it. Never mind she already married him, never mind she practically wrote half the damn contract herself, never mind that she got her duty up top. There is a deficiency, somewhere, a wrench in the works, and if he can root it out he can fix it.

Out come the ledgers. Out come the workers. Whole lotta souls in Asphodel, and that's a whole lotta hands to put to work if they'll take it. Mister Hades' machine rumbles to life. Coal, oil, steel. Smoke and fire, iron and fumes. If his lover leaves for the sun's warmth, he will make the underworld's fires burn twice as hot. If his lover leaves for the sun's light, he will make the underworld's electric lamps swell twice as bright. They will have their own chthonian summer down here, all to themselves.

See it now? That's where Mister Hades is getting it wrong. He is compensating for a deficiency that don't exist. He is assuming his lady leaves because she misses the sun, and not because it is her holy earthen duty as Persephone Eleusinia, sweet-as-honey fruitbearer, the saving goddess, to walk in the light and watch the seasons unfurl. He is assuming, plainly, that she leaves because she wishes, and not because she must. And so he tries in vain to fix what ain't broke, and wrecks it all in the process.

He's cut down the cypress trees to make space for more factories. Another office building, and a great sprawling warehouse right up against the railroad track. Now the train whistles and rumbles at every hour, porting goods back and forth between the upperworld and the one beneath. The river ain’t loud enough to drown out the sound, even when Lady Persephone’s cloistered behind the walls of her garden.

At first she don’t mind. Her husband’s excitement is charming when he shows her all the new business that’s coming in. He buys her fine jewels and a silken pashmina shot through with silvery thread, a set of beautiful heels which she woulda been terrified to wear outta the house when she was a young girl, on account of the dirt getting on them. He gets her exotic seeds to plant in her garden: dragon fruit and lychee, beautiful Bird of Paradise flowers whose brilliant orange petals fan out just like the wings of their namesake.

But the machines only get louder. Her husband’s office hours get longer. The charm wears off, and in its place is first dullness and then worse still, a kind of ugliness. Here is what makes a thing grotesque: when, in different lighting, it might be beautiful.

Lady Persephone does not know the point where it grew too much. The moment his machines got too loud; the stink of the fumes too thick. But now the warmth is an oppressive heat, dragging like the worst depths of summer. And Lady Persephone, well, she’s finding that like most things, it’s a lot easier to stand when you’re looking through a bottle.

The habit starts small and she don’t mean for it to get out of hand. She thinks back to Lady Hera. A glass or two to make the long evenings waiting out her husband a little easier. Another glass when whine of the machines gets too loud to stand. An evening indulgence sprawls into the afternoon, and then hell, into the morning too when the mood strikes her. And it’s starting to strike her well and often. And by the time it’s become routine enough for her notice this might not be the healthiest of coping mechanisms, well, she’s well-and-truly gone. Them bad habits which might be pleasant in moderation are the devil to kick when you let ‘em get the best of you. And Lord, does Lady Persephone let it get the best of her.

There is she is now: holding an iced gin and tonic to her forehead, sprawled across the settee with her eyes shut against the glare of the lights. From the other room, a gramophone whines with tinny, upbeat music. Her heels lie discarded on the plush Persian rug.

"Rough night?"

She cracks an eye open. Her husband stands at the foot of the sofa. Faint amusement in that deep voice of his, and more than a little endearment. Workin’ like a dog day and night, so he ain’t around enough to notice just how frequent these hangovers are getting. For the better, perhaps. Her husband circles the settee and gentle nudges at her legs until she swings them side to make room for him. The couch dips beneath his weight.

“Aye,” Persephone says, even though rough _morning _might be a touch more accurate. Her husband don’t need to know that detail, though. His eyes drift to the drink in her hand, and there’s a silent question there. She forces a smile. “Just a little gin, husband. Don’t worry yourself over it.”

“Not sure that’s the best remedy for a hangover,” he says wryly.

“Oh, for sure,” Persephone laughs, brushing the remark off because she ain’t got a defence for it. She sips her drink and brings the cool glass back to her cheek with a sigh. Her head aches against the rumble and sputter of the engines in the distance.

Her husband’s brow furrows. He can tell something’s off, she knows. There is a tension in the air like the first raindrops steaming off the bitumen, on the brink of a summer storm: the sky holding its breath. The gramophone whines the words of an old song that Persephone half-remembers dancing to, once upon a time: _I’ve got you, you’ve got whatever’s left of me to get_—

“Those new patents finally came in today,” Mister Hades says slowly, as if to fill in the silence.

“For the automobiles?” Persephone asks absently.

“Aye. They’re looking real slick. I reckon we got space for a new factory down by the Kokytos,” he says, mostly thinking aloud.

The thought of another factory spewing smoke and acid smuts makes her feel sick. She drains her glass and swipes a finger through the condensation beading around the outside. 

“Is there something wrong?” Mister Hades asks.

She realises she’s been silent for an awfully long time. She slouches back against the cushions and lets her eyes flutter shut against the electric glare, and repeats, “Don’t worry yourself over it.”

He is quiet. If she opens her eyes she knows she’ll find him watching her with concern, or twisting his wedding band on his finger like he does when he’s thinking over what to say next. Finally, he says, “Worryin’ is a husband’s job, love.”

“Apparently, so is nagging your wife,” Persephone says dryly, prodding him with her foot. Her attempt at good humour makes him smile, but the moment is fleeting. The heavy look of concern shadows his face once more. She sags back against the couch with a huff, and examines her empty glass. “Would you pass me that bottle on the table?”

“One moment.” He rises, but stops at the table. Picks up the bottle of gin with a frown. “How much of this have you had?”

“Not enough, clearly,” Persephone deadpans.

“This ain’t a joke, love,” he says, shooting her a chagrined look.

Persephone waves a dismissive hand. “Quit it, would you? My headache’s bad enough without you goin’ on at me.”

She staggers to her feet, and wavers a little as blood rushes to her head. She goes to the table and pours two fingers of tonic into the glass. Holds out a hand to her husband for the gin. He don’t relinquish it.

“I don’t think you need any more,” he says quietly.

She sets her glass down with a hard thud. Tonic sloshes at the rim, fizzes up noisily. There is a little pulse of irritation working its way up through her chest, and it keeps her voice low and hard when she speaks. “Oh, do you?”

“Aye, I do.”

She fixes him with a glare. Grounds out her words real slow and sharp, the way her ma always would when someone was on treacherous ground. “And exactly what authority is it you think you hold over me?”

“Can’t a man look out for his wife?” he asks, frustration bubbling over.

“Oh, aye, if he remembers to treat her like a grown woman who can make her own damn decisions,” Persephone says tersely. “Hand over the bottle, husband.”

She don’t even want another drink that badly, but she’ll be damned if she’s gonna let this go. Not with this bastard withholding it from her like she’s some misbehaving child. They stare one another down. He is stone-faced. She can see those gears turning in his brain, impenetrable as always. But she don’t back down. After a long few moments, he sighs heavily, and sets the bottle down on the table. Throws up his hands. “It’s your funeral.”

“Aye, it is,” she snaps. She sloshes a generous spike of the bottle into her tonic, and snatches up the glass. Stalks out of the room without another word, to somewhere where _he _won’t be. He watches her go in silence.

Later, she glares out at the skyline of Hadestown, and watches it spew smoke across the Styx. Beneath all the simmering frustration, her heart aches painfully for happier days. For the feeling of the sun warming her arms, grass brushing her ankles, the fierce joyful harmony of bird and cicada-song cresting in the air. Alcohol clouds through her thoughts, and she leans over the balcony and shuts her eyes until she feels like she might tip away into emptiness.

You see? The drink is a habit that grows gradually, the same way the smokestacks of Hadestown do. They grow together, feeding on one another. Hades and Persephone fall into the worst of themselves: him following her, her following him. However you want to see it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like comment subscribe whatever THANK U for reading this. Gonna be another chapter soon:)
> 
> Anyway in this house we support nuanced and sensitive portrayals of greek goddesses who are typically portrayed as bitchy, overprotective, cold, or uncaring in modern media (read: hera and demeter)!!!!!


	3. alpha in tauris

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even more recommended listening: Oceanographer's Choice, Old College Try, and See America Right by the Mountain Goats.  
Tw for alcoholism obv. A lot of it. also I'd like to say very quickly that alcohol abuse is a serious problem and nothing in this fic is intended to romanticise it. we've got a really bad youth drinking culture here in aotearoa and I cannot emphasise enough how harmful it can be. Always drink safely and in moderation for the love of god

Garden won't fill the hole where the sky should be. Persephone feels like she crawled into Hadestown like a virus entering its host, and now the whole place is falling apart while she takes root.

Easier to fill her flask and nurse it, steady and constant, like saline water from an IV drip. Need it to get through the hours, these days. She fans herself against the too-hot too-dry underground air and thinks about plunging herself into the Styx to float away with the other flotsam cast off by the dead.

She comes down here for him, and he spends his whole days locked in his office. The time they do spend together leaves them both raw. They grate on one another painfully, now. Her, enclosed in perpetual drunken apathy. Him, pulled taut by exhaustion. Hadestown becomes a place to be endured. Days pass by easier in the bottle, and what's a girl gotta do in times like these?

Sour-crisp punch of quinine and juniper used to taste exquisite, but now all she can taste is the ugly burn of the alcohol against her palate.

The speakeasy, now that's a little patch of Elysium down here in Hell. Lady Persephone is its patron and founder, with a little assistance from Hekate and her strange brews and herbs gleaned from the wayside. They ain't the only gods who frequent the premises: Mister Hermes, old Argeiphontes, likes to make frequent appearances. For the music, he says, but Persephone can’t shake the feeling he’s keeping an eye on her. On occasion, you also got the Fates, who only seem to appear to sneer at her and make their cryptic little remarks before disappearing again to wherever they go.

But mostly its customers are the dead, drawn from all parts. Workers mixing with wanderers from Asphodel, and occasionally a stray from the Isles of the Blest (ain't many souls who make it out there, nowadays). They crowd hungrily at the bar, listening to Lady Persephone sing like starving dogs with their ears bent back, ready to seize whatever life they might glean for themselves. She won't lie, she don't mind feeling needed like that. Strokes the peculiarly divine part of her ego real nice, particularly now that she and her husband are on the rocks.

She ends her nights early in the morning, herding out the lingering drunks and closing up the doors, before staggering her way home through Hadestown’s empty ever-glow streets. It’s a ten-minute walk, and that’s ten whole minutes alone with her thoughts. Whatever good mood that speakeasy leaves her in, it’s always well and gone by the time she reaches that old house by the river. Like just being _near _her husband is starting to put her out of sorts.

The edges are fraying. Oughta take a lighter to it, burn off the stray threads. But Lady Persephone don’t got a clue where to start. They are off-kilter and out of tune and she ain’t so sure she even remembers how the song used to go.

Out late again. Mister Hades comes home to an empty house. Dark, rooms barely illuminated by the city lights winking through the windows. He fumbles for the light-switch. Hangs up his hat and coat. It’s been a long day. Some plague up top sending souls streaming in, pressed in tight on the train. Breakdown on the track didn’t help; had to send Thanatos to help Mister Hermes herd the shades down the rest of the way. He presses the bridge of his nose and sighs heavily.

Here is Mister Hades when he’s unobserved: not a king, not the boss, not even a husband, really. Just a man, tired as a dog, and Lord, if it ain’t moments like these he could use a gentle touch.

There’s a bottle left on the bench; not an uncommon sight nowadays. Another day, Mister Hades woulda poured himself a glass and kicked off his shoes and padded up to his office to get on with the ledgers for a couple of hours before bed. But gin is Persephone’s drink. Sweet juniper belying the fact that that shit goes down like gasoline. Mister Hades, now he’s a bourbon man himself, but he’ll drink anything provided it gets the job done. But these days, gin is starting to turn his stomach. That’s the smell of their arguments.

Mister Hades sets about fixing himself a late dinner. Feels mighty strange to be going about his summer routine in the dead of winter, cooking alone. But he cooks for two, in case his wife’s hungry when she gets back.

He cooks. He eats. He checks the clock. He treks upstairs and fetches some papers he’s gotta read through, and sets up at the kitchen table. Considers that bottle of gin sitting malignant on the bench and finally relents and pours himself a glass. Tastes clean, in the foul chemical way of antiseptic and window cleaner. 

When Lady Persephone finally comes home, she’s piss-drunk and he’s dead-tired. She staggers in and drops her coat on the chair. Stares at him for a moment and then says, “You don’t gotta wait up for me.”

“I know,” he says. He rises and goes to fetch her a glass of water. She busies herself with the laces of her boots, unlacing them with the exaggerated drunken care, and kicks them off. She slumps down in the chair. Mister Hades sets the glass of water down in front of her. With careful neutrality, he says, “It seems like you enjoyed yourself tonight.”

“Can’t a girl have a little fun?” Persephone snorts. She picks up the water and it sloshes a little on its way to her mouth.

“_Is_ this fun?” he asks flatly. He don’t mean it to sound so hostile, but the tone slips in through the exhaustion.

“You ain’t my babysitter, old man,” she grumbles.

“That don’t mean I can’t worry about you,” he says.

“Believe me, I can take care of myself,” Persephone says. She adds, with a curl of her lip, “Been doing that a lot lately anyhow.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You spend so long shut up in your goddamned office,” she snaps. “I don’t see why you got any right to go on at _me _for comin’ home late.”

Mister Hades don’t got a thing to say to that. His jaw sets, lips press to a hard line. He wants to tell her, _don’t you see I been doing all this for you? _But he says nothing, cause he thinks he’s angry enough that if he opens his mouth he might say something cruel instead. She gets right under his skin and wrenches right on the nerve, this wife of his. Can’t stand a moment more of her vitriol. Tone clipped, he tells her good night.

They both go to bed in a sour mood.

Sleep is restless. There are nights when Persephone lies awake, staring at the gentle sway of the city lights that filter through the curtains and lay themselves out on the ceiling above her. Her head pounds, and in the distance, Hadestown shudders and scrapes with every breath it sucks into its iron lungs. Her mouth sticky, alcohol leaving it tasting foul, like she’s licked the underside of a tyre.

Inches from her, her husband slumbers. Another day, another year, if she hadn’t gone to bed quite so frustrated with him, she mighta rolled over and slid an arm across his chest, let herself drift back to sleep. But she just lies still, leaving those inches open between them. Watches as his chest rises and falls, with steady breaths, his eyelids giving just the barest flutter as he dreams. So peaceful, without the cast of exhaustion pinching at his face. Not a king, not a businessman, not even a husband: just a man.

She’ll drive herself insane, staring at him like this. Mourning who they were and who they are now. So she slips from the bed and goes to fetch an aspirin, to drive off the headaches that have become routine.

She stops even managing the train ride sober. Mister Hades comes upstairs to find her a right mess, leaning off Mister Hermes' shoulder lopsidedly, that awful silver flask flashing in her hand. He says nothing, and she's too far gone to care. Mister Hermes seats her carefully in one of the well-cushioned seats, and shares a worried look with Mister Hades.

"Something going on in the House o' Hades I oughta know about?" Mister Hermes asks, voice low.

"Spot of disharmony never killed no one," Mister Hades says, voice even. And over the top of his dark glasses, he fixes Mister Hermes with a cold stare that says: and it ain't your business anyhow.

Mister Hermes throws up his hands with a chagrined smile. "A'ight. Just looking out for our Lady of the Summertime."

And he steps out of the carriage, and closes the door behind him. Mister Hades takes his seat opposite his wife. She's watching him, inscrutable.

"Is this going to become routine?" he asks, unable to keep a note of ire out of his voice.

"I ain't in the mood, old man," she grumbles.

"Neither am I," he says.

She glowers. "If you got somethin' to say, come out and say it."

And half a year ago, Mister Hades mighta found a more diplomatic way to put this. But his patience is wearing thin. So he says, bluntly, “It ain’t even ten in the morning and you’re off your face.”

“A little celebration ain’t hurt a soul,” she says. “Ain’t I permitted a little festivity before I go back to join the dead?”

“This ain’t a _little _festivity, wife,” Mister Hades says flatly.

Persephone waves a dismissive hand. “By _your _standards. You know, most people _like _having fun.”

That strikes a particular raw nerve. Stings like all hell. Mister Hades sets his jaw and glowers. Wives always know the worst way to wound. How she does it so carelessly, he’ll never know. She mirrors his scowl and turns away to stare out the window, at the world flushing gold with autumn as she departs.

Is he imagining the melancholy that flashes across her face? He can’t resist asking, “You don’t wanna go down this year, do you?”

It is some masochistic instinct that prompts those words: he almost _wants _her to tell it to him straight, so perhaps he might stop clinging after her like a dog that don’t know when to quit it. She don’t look away from the window, even as she tips that flask to her lips. Cheeks flushed red; even as his frustration simmers, he would still give anything to take her face in his hands and kiss her.

“What makes you think that?” she says, and he can’t make sense of her tone in the slightest.

“You know what,” he says shortly.

She just keeps staring out that window like he ain’t even there. Lifts the flask, takes a drink.

“You even listening to me?” he presses on. His irritation makes his words ugly. “Is there some _other _reason you’re off getting shit-faced every morning and night?”

And there – she finally turns to look at him. Venomous, she snaps, “I don’t need booze to get through a conversation with the sun, do I?”

That’s it. Those words oughta set him free. _She hates it down there. She hates _you. Husband and wife pass the rest of the journey in stony silence, and Mister Hades nurses his anger like she does her flask. But he finds that wretched hangdog longing is still tethered tight, unshaken, even by her cruelty.

Lashing out brings its own ugly satisfaction. But like the drink, the pleasure is short-term. After comes a sick feeling settling in her stomach, hangover guilt, that lingers long after the train pulls into Hadestown. Her husband departs in silence. She shouldn’t have said that to him.

He comes home late that night, catches her as she’s cleaning up the kitchen. She glances up from the dishes and flashes him a tight smile. “There’s still some risotto left, if you’re hungry.”

It is a peace offering, of sorts. Mister Hades hangs up his hat and shrugs out of his overcoat. Got a stony look on his face. Flatly, he says, “Not drinking tonight, then?”

She ain’t got the right to be sour at his bad mood, not when she’s the prime cause of it. But it stings anyhow. She shoots him a wounded look. He stares back, unmoved.

“I ain’t in the mood to fight, husband,” she sighs.

“Good. Neither am I,” he says shortly. She feels a stab of irritation at his matter-of-fact tone – like _she’s _the one at fault here. The self-righteous bastard.

“Oh? You wanna explain why you walked in here trying to start one, then?” Persephone says.

“How was my askin’ a simple question an attempt to start an argument?” he demands, even though he knows full well how. “It ain’t my fault you got a drinking problem.”

“The only damn problem I got, Mister Hades, is _you_,” Persephone snarls, slamming down the saucepan into the sink with a hideous clash.

He blinks. And then, coldly, says, “I’ll get my own dinner. Good night, wife.”

And he disappears up to his office. Persephone stares at the suds splashed all down the front of her dress. The tap is still running, she realises. Hot water steaming. Without thinking, she sticks a hand under it, and flinches backwards when it scalds her. She feels numb. She feels—Lord, she needs a goddamn drink.

And if later that night, she goes to sleep in the guest room, on account of not wanting to share a bed with that man, well, you can’t blame her, can you?

Mister Hades spends half the year alone anyway, so he sleeps alright in an empty bed. That don’t stop him feeling wretched in the morning. He pads down the hall and passes the guest room, door shut tight. For a moment he considers knocking – but it’s too early. Waking her would only irritate her, he thinks. He picks up his hat and his coat and Mister Hades heads to work.

“You need to speak with her,” Hera says over the phone, later that day. The line is punctuated by the tap-tap-tap of her manicured nails on the receiver. Leave it to the lady on the brink of divorce to be handing out marriage advice.

Mister Hades sighs. “Tried that. Havin’ a conversation with her is like stepping onto a damn minefield.”

But lord, Hera’s right. He tries again, and again, and again. Some days it’s him who trips up: a sudden burst of frustration, and Persephone loses her temper. Other days it’s all her, loaded up with drink, wine turning her tongue cruel. Just when Mister Hades thinks he’s built up a map of that minefield in his head, his lady goes and drops another shell on him.

He comes home one night to find she’s moved all her clothes into the guestroom. They don’t talk about it, not until he brings it up during another row: “Why come down here at all, if you ain’t even gonna try?”

“Because, _husband_,” and she spits the word like it tastes vile in her mouth, “No matter how much you want it to, the world don’t stop turning every time you pick a fight with your wife!”

The nights when they do speak go just like that. Erupting into fury. Most nights, though, they move around this house like they are ghosts haunting it. Silent, eyes down, pretending the other ain’t there. It is a miserable way to live. Mister Hades sleeps at his office on occasion, because the thought of returning to that dark and cold house got him feeling sick inside.

Those are the days when the melancholy gets at him. Worse are the days when he’s angry. Angry at himself, angry at her. His anger ain’t strung tight like hers, lashing forth at the barest provocation. Mister Hades got a cold sort of anger, and he takes it out on himself. Works himself bare, sends himself spiralling. Perhaps that hangdog part of himself thinks that he might hurt her if he hurts himself enough. Present her the exhausted wreck of himself and say, _look at what you did. _

Hera’s advice rings in his mind all the while. Works himself up to one final attempt the day before Spring is due. He don’t leave for work that morning, and instead busies himself with housework while he waits for Persephone to rise. Better to catch her now, before she’s had the chance to start her routine of drowning herself in spirits.

She rises late morning, and stops dead in the kitchen when she sees him settled at the table, poring over his paperwork. Her hair is loose around her shoulders in a wild tangle, dressing gown open over her shift. He ain’t seen her this undone in a long while.

“What are you doing?” she asks bluntly, and immediately reaches for the coffee pot.

He falters for a moment, as his words escape him. He manages to say, “I think we oughta talk.”

She takes a moment to pour her coffee, then says, “About what?”

Tone flat, but Mister Hades feels a little bolstered at the lack of hostility there. He presses at a crease in the paper in front of him. “We’re in a bad way, and I ain’t eager to continue like this.”

“Can it wait?” Persephone sighs, and turns away. There is another long pause, punctuated by the clatter of cutlery. Back still turned, she says sourly, “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to drink to get through this morning.”

“Would you at least _try_?” he asks. “Can we go a moment without doing …this?”

She turns and fixes him with an unreadable look. Like she ain’t sure whether she got the energy to be angry. “Fine. What’ve you got to say?”

He takes a deep breath. “I’m worried about you.”

“That’s your problem,” she mutters. Louder, she adds, “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” he says gently. “I want to help you, but I don’t know how. Please.”

“I’m fine,” she repeats stonily.

“Drinking morning and night ain’t ‘fine’,” he says, voice level.

She snorts, and turns back to her coffee without a word. Pours milk into it, and half a spoon of sugar. Still taking her coffee the same way all these years. She lifts the mug and takes a sip, and then turns back to him with a hard look. “Thought you said you didn’t want to argue today, husband.”

He hates it when she calls him that. Says it with such venom. He can feel the conversation slipping away, as they fall back into their old pattern. He says, tone clipped, “I ain’t trying to argue. But we need to _talk_, or we’ll never get past this. If you’d just admit to yourself that you got a problem—”

“Christ, old man, would you lay off me for a minute?” she snaps. “The only problem here is your self-righteous self-pitying _bullshit_!”

Tether snaps. Paper crumbles under Mister Hades’ clenched fist. _She _wants to talk about selfishness? He’s cut out his heart and offered it to her on a plate and all she does is turn him away again and again and again. The whole of himself and the whole of Hadestown is entirely for _her _and she won’t even look up from her drink long enough to take a look. 

“Well? You too busy thinking of a new insult to throw at me?” she demands.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Mister Hades says, and his voice strains, almost pleading.

“What I want is for you to leave me alone!” she spits, slamming her cup down and storming out.

A minefield, like he said. Mister Hades takes a deep, deep breath, and cradles his head in his hands.

Later he’ll find the train gone a day early. He won’t say anything, just nod stiffly and return to his office. Throw himself into the work, because if he’s thinking about the numbers then that’s another moment he ain’t thinking about her. And when autumn comes around once more, he takes her words to heart: he don’t bother going to pick her up.

Summer stretches on, too hot, too long. Sweating heat, mosquito itch, weeks into Autumn when the air should be clear and cool. Persephone’s suitcase has been sitting packed for _days_. Mister Hermes says, mildly, “Perhaps you oughta make your own way down, this year.”

“I’m too old to walk it,” Persephone grumbles, and it’s only halfway an excuse. She ain’t felt youthful for a long while.

Mister Hermes sighs. He’s starting to look a little grey himself, round the edges. “A’ight. I’ll see what I can do.”

He don’t ask why, which Lady Persephone appreciates. He’s better than her ma, who storms in one sweltering morning with a basket of rotted apples and says, “What the _hell _has that husband of yours done now?”

“It’s what he _ain’t _done that’s the problem,” Persephone says.

“I see that,” Demeter says tartly. “He better pick you up soon. We need a winter.”

Persephone shrugs. Late morning like this, she’s already a few sips into her flask. Her voice shakes a little. “It’s just a rough patch, ma. Enjoy the extra sun.”

Demeter’s irritation fades when she hears that little hitch in her daughter’s voice. Her expression softens. “I don’t mean it to sound like I want you gone, girl. You know how important these months are to me. But this world is bigger than just how I feel. It must keep turning, love.”

“I know, ma,” Persephone says hoarsely.

And a couple of days later: ghost train rumbling up the tracks. Stops at the station with that high clear whistle. It feels like the whole world sighs in relief, as a cold wind brushes through. Mister Hermes flicks Charon a coin and leaps down from the carriage with a flourish, spritelier than a man his age oughta be.

“You all packed?” he asks Persephone.

“Aye,” she says. And she climbs onto the empty train, taking that long and lonely summer with her.

House is empty. Neat, in the way her husband likes things, but with the curtains drawn shut the air inside has gone stale. There are two dirty plates stacked beside the sink, and one coffee mug, half-finished. Black as pitch and sugar-sweet.

It feels like walking into a mausoleum, so still and quiet. Persephone sets down her things and throws open the curtains. Electric light streams in from the city outside, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. She lingers at the window for a moment, watching the smokestacks bloom up and the foundry sputter. Her husband is out there somewhere, buried in his ledgers, or whatever it is he finds so important in his office.

She ain’t got the energy to feel sad. Out of habit, she pulls out her flask and takes a swig. Might as well make the house nice. Just cause their marriage is falling apart don’t mean everything else has to along with it.

He comes back just as she’s putting dinner on. Beef stew with honeyed apricots, fragrant warmth flooding the kitchen. She pours red wine over the meat as she braises it, and lifts the bottle to her lips to take a generous swig before setting it back down and tossing the pan. And then she realises she ain’t alone – Mister Hades shadows the doorway, watching her silently.

“Well, are you gonna stand there all day?” she says, more harshly than she means to.

“You came back,” he says, like he can’t believe it.

She feels a sudden stab of annoyance. Sniping at him is automatic, as much a habit as the drink now. “Don’t I get a hello? Or an apology, maybe?”

“For what?” he asks flatly. There he goes, closing up in defence. They are stuck into this routine like clockwork now.

“You were late,” she snaps, slamming the pan down hard with a clash. Oil sputters in the pan. The meat is burning. “You wanna explain that?”

“I didn’t think you wanted to come back,” he says acidly. And before she can throw him another sharp retort, he turns on his heels and walks away.

She finishes the stew. She eats it alone, over more wine, with the radio turned up as high as it’ll go in the hope that the sound will irritate him enough to interfere with that cursed paperwork of his. And then she boxes up the leftovers and leaves it in the refrigerator, cause she ain’t petty enough to throw out a damn good stew like that.

After an hour or two alone with her thoughts and that bottle, the anger wears away. In its place is a low ache: loneliness, all clumsy and twisted up in the wine. After another hour, she gives in to it. Fetches some bourbon from the cellar, the real good shit, and two lowball glasses. She climbs the stairs, a little unsteady, and comes to the door of his office. She knocks.

“What?”

“Brought you a peace offering,” she says, nudging the door open and holding up the bottle. Forces a tight smile. “I didn’t mean to be so coarse with you earlier.”

Her husband looks up from his paperwork wearily. Persephone don’t give him a chance to turn her away. She steps over the threshold and sets the glasses down, pouring out two generous shots before he can protest. He watches the amber liquid with a distant, melancholy look. When she holds the glass out to him, he hesitates before taking it.

Persephone slumps into the comfy chair on the other side of the desk and raises her own glass in a mock toast. “To happier days,” she says sardonically, and tips it back.

“To happier days,” Mister Hades echoes, still with that distant look. He watches her over the rim of his glass for a moment, and then takes a measured sip.

They sit together in silence. Persephone traces the meander pattern detail on the exterior of her glass with one finger. She hopes he’ll say something, but he maintains his stony silence. After too long, she has to fill in the gap where the conversation ought to be. “Did you really think I wouldn’t come back?”

“You hate it here,” her husband rumbles. He takes another sip.

She don’t refute that. But she does say, “You ain’t exactly helping the matter.”

And her husband don’t refute that one either. He rubs a hand over his face, and sighs. Good god, the man looks tired. Run himself thin on all this work. She waits for him to say something, but he just finishes his drink and watches her quietly. Gears turning in that old brain of his, though she ain’t got a damn clue what the hell he could be thinking. Unreachable as his wall.

She hides her growing irritation by pouring herself another glass.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally.

It’s so unexpected that she can’t stop herself from letting out a sharp, bitter laugh. She slumps back in the chair with a snort. “For what?”

“For not coming to pick you up,” her husband concedes. He reaches for the bottle and pours himself another finger.

She waits, hoping for more, but he don’t elaborate. Alright. She’ll take what she can get; this man is a miserly wretch when it comes to articulating what he’s actually thinking. She ain’t got the energy to fight about it anymore.

“Apology accepted,” she says.

He nods. It feels like a truce. Both of them are tense and stilted, for fear of saying something that’ll set the other off again; like every word is a stray bullet that might shatter the ceasefire. Hades downs his second drink and pours himself another. Persephone’s lost count after all the wine. Everything is cast in that dull haze of drunkenness.

“I miss you,” she says distantly, considering the weight of the glass in her hands. “It ain’t the same, making the journey down alone.”

“You think I don’t know that?” he says quietly. A gentle reminder that he knows well that peculiar sting of loneliness, as much if not more so than she does.

“I think you let yourself forget that you ain’t the only one hurtin’, sometimes,” Persephone says. Another day she woulda said that with the intention of causing him pain, but she says it without vitriol now. She’s had enough pain, this winter.

Her husband is quiet for a long while. Then, voice slow with the spirits, he says, “You keep comin’ back. Every time I think I’ve finally cut the tether, you’re there again.”

She knows how that feels too. Knows that however hard they beat it back, this place will always reach for them once more. They are tied to the underground, and tied to their duties. She murmurs, “Ain’t got much leeway, when the harvest depends on you.”

“If the story started all over again, would you still marry me?” he asks. She knows that dull tone: he is expecting an answer that will hurt him. Hoping for it, perhaps.

“You old fool,” she murmurs, a little fondly. “Course I would.”

“Truly?”

She wants to take him in her arms and hold him close, bury her face in his hair, soothe his doubts away with kisses. But the years have put a distance between them. Her words will have to do. “Sure as the sun rises each morning.”

He exhales slowly. Takes another long drink. Her eyes are prickling, up this late, and with the amount she’s drunk and the soft tranquil setting over the room, she’s feeling fatigue weigh heavy on her. Her husband says, wryly, “You oughta go to bed before you keel over.”

“Aye,” she grumbles, rubbing her eyes. Staggers up out of the chair and sways precariously. He rises and steadies her, hand on her shoulder. The first time they’ve touched in _months_; it feels like an electric shock. She rights herself, and he withdraws – but she lingers for a moment more than she needs to, longing pooling drunkenly in her chest.

They ain’t slept in the same bed for a long while. The thought of going back to an empty room is suddenly unbearable. Not with this rare glimpse of peace hanging fragile between them.

“Come to bed,” she murmurs, laying her heart right out on her sleeve. “I don’t want to sleep alone.”

He hesitates, and then his face falls. “I still got a lot of work to do.”

Certainly the truth, likely an excuse. Persephone smiles sadly, blinking away a sudden swell of tears that got no business here. “Alright. Good night.”

“Good night,” he echoes as she leaves.

Later, as she lies awake in the dark, eyes pricking but no slumber in sight, she feels the bed dip, as her husband climbs in beside her. He pulls up the blankets, careful as he ever was not to take up more than his half, and settles in. She holds her breath, hesitates. Then rolls over to press up beside him. For a moment they are both stiff and still and awkward – then he murmurs, “I missed you too.”

“I know,” she whispers back, and they melt into each other, and into sleep.

Mister Hades always wakes up early, without the aid of an alarm clock. He lies still, eyes open, and takes in the feeling of another body curled beside him. His hands, tangled with his wife’s beneath the sheets. It feels like a dream. Something that was once familiar, made strange and foreign by the passage of time.

He wishes he could stay. But there is paperwork to be done, contracts to be signed, orders to be filled. And there is part of him, perhaps, which is afeared that he’d ruin whatever truce they came too last night. That the spell would shatter in daylight. So gently, he untangles himself from his wife’s embrace, and leaves her to her slumber.

He pauses to pour her a glass of water and leave some aspirin on the bedside: his quiet way of caring.

Lady Persephone stands in the overgrown garden. Blackberry bramble has overtaken it all, strangling the calla lilies and the fragrant narcissus. Her hands are soft now, and her dress too fine to go trampling about the undergrowth like she used to. Ain’t got the wherewithal to get it back into order. Reality chafes and buzzes against her skin, this long being sober. So she just stands there, in the grass growing up to her knees, staring at the ruin made by time. When did they let it get this bad?

Springtime looms. She packs up her bags and pulls on her hat and coat, but she can’t bring herself to board the train. Not without saying goodbye. The peace between them is a precious thing and she cannot let go of it, not yet.

The walk through Hadestown is different every time. There are always new buildings and new faces. The smokestacks loom up overhead, casting the office in their shadow. The dead throng the streets, more than she’s ever seen in one place. They stream in and out for their shifts as the steam whistle howls, padding slow and lethargically, like debris crawling along a riverstream.

This is the belly of her husband’s great machine. The closer she draws to the office, the more she notices how _hollow _the workers look. Eyes blank, backs bent. They still sing, like all the dead do, but their song is monotonous, uniform, like a discordant drone that plods in unison with the whine and clang of the machines. Like the assembly line has stripped them down to nothing but another pair of hands.

It is _wrong_, unnatural. Human souls made little more than shells. What is he doing to them? What malignant clause did the Eumenides hide in their contracts, to keep the dead like this?

Her horror grows, coils in her gut as she makes her way through the office doors. Past the queues of dead, up the stairs. No one stops her from knocking on the doors. Her husband says, “Come in.”

And he sets his papers down in surprise when he sees it’s her.

“Train leaves today,” she says, closing the door behind her. She doesn’t step any farther in. The horrible hollow eyes of the workers linger in the back of her mind. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

“I lost track of the time,” her husband says, rising from his chair. But he don’t cross the room to her. They are both hesitant. Treading lightly around the fragile ceasefire. And perhaps he can see that there’s something on her mind.

“I saw the workers,” Persephone blurts out. She is hoping for some explanation, some reason to believe that this is not her husband’s doing. She tries, and fails, to keep her voice steady. “On the way here. They look half-dead.”

“Well, they _are _ghosts,” Mister Hades says dryly.

“You know what I mean,” she says tersely. Then she takes a breath, tries to gather herself. “There’s something wrong. Something missing from them.”

“Business is picking up. We’re all pulling long shifts, these days.”

“This ain’t just exhaustion, husband,” Persephone insists. “Something ain’t right with them.”

He hesitates. Opens his mouth as if to offer up more assurances, and then thinks better of it. Instead, admits, “We made a few adjustments to the contract to make things run a little more smoothly.”

“You call that a little ‘adjustment to the contract’?” Persephone demands. “They’re little more than slaves out there.”

“I offered the terms, and they accepted it,” her husband says. “It’s just business.”

“Just _business_? Those are human lives,” she snaps. Goddamn him and his foul _business_. Goddamn this joyless city beneath the earth. Devil take it all, she thinks. This hellish _business _ruined her marriage.

“They are dead,” her husband says coldly. “This is better than they could hope for in Asphodel.”

“Better for them? Or better for you?” Persephone demands. The truce is tearing under the strain. All those loose threads, unravelling in her hands. “This ain’t _right_.”

“What the hell did you think paid for all them jewels at your throat? What the hell do you think pays for the food on your table or the damned shit you’re pouring into that flask?” His voice is rising, hard-edged bed-rock. There is a shadow cast over his face. “You don’t get to say that. Not when I’ve been doing all this for you.”

_I never asked for this_, she wants to scream, but there’s tears stopping up her throat like a broken pipe. Tears of rage, because it’s just like him to deflect the blame. She ain’t never asked a thing from him except _himself_, and he withholds even that from her, offers up this cold dead place instead. Damn him and this business. Damn Hadestown to the Hell it’s turned into.

It is all she can do to hold herself together, long enough to walk out that door. Out of Hadestown, past the slaves her husband has made of the dead. And once she collapses into her seat on the train, she finally lets it go. Finally falls to pieces, weeping, for the workers and for herself and for her husband, and for that brief moment of peace they’d shared just hours before.


	4. the wall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've run out of mountain goats songs to rec so here's some Mitski ones: Carry Me Out (it always reminds me of Eurydice and Flowers), Drunk Walk Home, and Two Slow Dancers (which makes me cry literally every time I hear the last couple of lines)  
The usual tws (alcoholism, greek mythology's typical questionable consent issues) apply :,-)

A few years on, he starts to build the wall.

It’s the first thing Lady Persephone sees, through the grimy bottle-glass train windows. Great grey brick pressing up against the black sky. The vapours and the smoke, lit up in luminescent amber clouds by the electric lights, stir and billow within its confines. The train passes into the blackness of a tunnel for a moment – and then it emerges into Hadestown. The station sits right up against the bricks.

Mister Hades is waiting for her. Offers her a hand as she clambers out of the carriage. She takes it, unsteadily, and steps onto the bitumen. Stares up at that great wall with a growing sense of dread. Coiling in her gut like a great serpent. It is too tall, leans in far too close. She feels dwarfed against it. Hades’ grip on her hand is too tight.

Further down the track, construction is still in progress. Workers haul bricks up like Sisyphos and his rock. They sing a work song like a funeral dirge, and hell, it might well be, cause they probably don’t remember much beyond their own graves.

“What is this?” she asks her husband, and her voice is strung thin. She ain’t sober enough for this. Nine hells, she feels sick. She can’t hear the river over the sounds of the construction. Been drowned out completely by the clash of hammers and the whine of the saw. Factories pump and spit in the distance.

Mister Hades looks up at his wall with this awful pale light in his eyes. She don’t like to see it. Looks too much like that mask he pulls over his face for his _business_. “I know it ain’t pretty, but it’ll be well-worth the cost. Been a bit of unrest out in Asphodel. The workers getting a little disquieted. Figured this would give us all a little peace of mind.”

The workers’ funereal song and the fatigue bending their backs are anything _but _peaceful. Persephone sways unsteadily. There is a kind of terror at seeing something so alien as this wall. Still and unmoving and fearsome in its size. Lady Persephone can’t shake the feeling that it’s sentient, somehow. That a great eye may snap open between the slits in the brick, or an open mouth. As if it is watching her, as if it is hungry. As if once the impenetrable bricks are finally heaved into place, she’ll be sealed inside Hadestown forever. Concrete coffin, iron grave.

They need the speakeasy more than ever. A place for Persephone to pretend the walls of this cage don’t press in so, a place for the workers to pretend they got something more to live for than the assembly line. An escape for them all.

Here she is: microphone in hand, dress glittering, crooning her song to the dead. Lights low, casting them all in warm amber, filtering through the haze of smoke that fills the room. Later she’ll be at the bar, filling orders with a deft hand, laughing along with her ghostly patrons, serving up that little glimpse of the sky they been starving for all summer. The speakeasy is her garden; she tends the dead like she used to tend her flowers.

And towards the end of the night, when her flask has been filled and refilled and is nearing empty once more, she’ll reach a place outside herself. Music and fog filling up her head until there’s no room left for her thoughts, just a swelling in her chest. And she’ll shut her eyes and imagine walking out of the cloud of smoke and heat and into cool spring air, where there is no underworld and no overworld, just herself and the grass under her heels and the sky clear and blue above.

She craves those moments. They are intoxicating, enough that she’ll keep at it with the flask, again and again and again, even as she feels everything falling apart around her. And it’s another vicious cycle, because Persephone drinks and that makes Hadestown more hellish, so she drinks to forget it and they spiral, together, down and down and down and down.

If she were more honest with herself, she might realise that holing up in the speakeasy ain’t the only way she can help the workers. That she could put down the flask and confront her husband about the wall, about the contracts, about the endless work. But she’s afraid, because he might say no. And then she’d truly have to acknowledge what sort of man she married. She’d have to acknowledge that perhaps her ma was right about him; that, perhaps, the story hadn’t really changed after all.

The radio towers clamber up into the Stygian sky, iron rungs latticing back and forth up the spires like the rigid skeleton of some cold towering beast. Dishes open against the smog-filled air; faceless flowers in full bloom. Mister Hades watches the skyline of his city ascend and fill with his creations and he thinks, there is such beauty in manufactured things.

That beauty don’t fill the gaping hole in his heart where his wife oughta be. She tore out of there long ago and left a gaping wreck of a ruin in her wake. There are days when he feels no better than the dead, when all he’s got is his work, driving him onwards.

Even in the winter, he rarely sees her. In the evenings, on occasion, if she ain’t holed up in that speakeasy of hers. (Oh, Mister Hades is well-aware of the speakeasy, even if she thinks he ain’t. It’s hard to hide anything in Hadestown from the man who owns it.) Their conversations are terse, if they happen at all. Half the time she’s in a stupor, too far gone to do anything but glare at him over the rim of her glass.

There is little joy to be found in Mister Hades’ life, these days, so he’ll take what he can get. For now that’s the sight of his radio towers looming above his city. He’ll put them to good use. Already got the speech planned out: _we build the wall to keep us free_. The workers need to hear it. A couple of reports have been coming in, off missing stocks and supplies, freight-hopping, conspiracies. Little things, for now, but Mister Hades knows well how easily a little allowance can get out of hand. Best remind them who’s boss.

Best remind his wife, too. Seems her little speakeasy’s at the heart of all these little problems: plying the dead with water from the Mnemosyne, a cup full of sky, a breath of the world above. Life creeping in between the clauses in the contract, letting the workers remember that they got a human soul, down there under all the muck.

And that’s where the beauty lies, between the transistors and the wires. Two birds, one stone: control the seeds of dissent Persephone is allowing to bloom in her speakeasy, and the workers will fall back in line. Let them remember that their Lady of the Underground is his wife, first and foremost. The key to keeping control see, ain’t how hard you grip the tether. It’s knowing where to leash it.

Brewing is a tricky business, particularly when you’re working with things that God ain’t ever intended to be imbibed. Hekate taught Persephone long ago how to bottle petrichor and pluck clouds from the sky. Now the careful science fills her hours, holed up in Hekate’s workshop on the outskirts of Hadestown. Macerating the ethanol with birdsong, a little dew and a little cherry-blossom, the smell of fragrant peaches. Then cut it with spring water and distil it in tight-sealed oaken barrels, until you got a lovely springtime blend that aches of home. Her hands are stained pink with fresh plum juice this afternoon, hair tumbling from her updo and frizzing up in the humid workshop air. The kettle whines on the stove, and another pot bubbles happily to itself, boiling up a little powdered moonlight, delicate and wistful as the clear night sky.

She’s just rinsing off her mortar and pestle when the door of the workshop opens. At first she thinks it’s Hekate, back from roaming the wayside – but it is her husband. Mister Hades pulls off his hat and says, “Afternoon, love. Got a moment?”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Persephone says, setting the granite mortar down in the sink with a thud. He shouldn’t be here. This is _her _space. She didn’t even think he knew about this place, let alone would bother coming all the way out here. Hekate liked to be a little out of people’s way.

Mister Hades tucks his hat under his arm and steps further into the room, looking around at her work with interest. He stops at the counter and picks up one of the unmarked glass bottles, filled with a deceptively clear brew that Persephone bottled earlier today. “I got something I need your assistance with.”

“I’m busy,” she says flatly, drying her hands on her apron and stalking over to pluck the bottle out of his hands. He lets her take it.

“I wouldn’t come all the way out here if it weren’t important,” he says.

She sighs. He ain’t gonna leave, not until he’s got whatever it is he wants. She makes a gesture for him to keep talking, and turns back to her work. Takes to the dried rainclouds a little more viciously than she needs to with the pestle.

“I’m sure you’ve noticed the radio towers getting installed,” he says, raising his voice a little to be heard over the noise. “And the new broadcasts.”

Oh aye, she’s noticed his broadcasts. Can’t damn well miss them, with speakers echoing his voice through every street of this cursed town. Heard a fair few of the dead repeating that speech in the speakeasy. The wall is good, they’d insisted, against every protest. We need the wall, they’d repeated. Like her husband had found a way to unscrew the tops of their heads and rummage around inside. It’s got her hair on end, the same way the wall does, like it’s going to wind itself around their throats and choke them all.

Mister Hades continues, “I’d like it if you were present at the assemblies. It would do the workers some good.”

She sets down the pestle and turns to face him with a sharp, humourless laugh. “You’re joking if you think I’m getting up there with you.”

“It’s no joke,” he says.

“Let me rephrase: I ain’t doing it.” Her voice is hard.

“Shame,” he rumbles. “I was hoping you would. It would save me shutting down the speakeasy.”

His tone is far too casual. He knew she’d refuse. She feels ice crawling up her insides. How does he know about that? Her voice strains as she says, “Why the hell would you need to shut it down? It ain’t hurting a soul.”

“It’s threatening stability. Known dissidents have been assembling on the premises—”

“Bullshit,” she cuts him off. “You own their souls, you bastard, they ain’t got the wherewithal to dissent left in ‘em.”

“They do when they got someone feeding them the sky every night,” he says swiftly, with a pointed look at the bottles on the bench.

This is the only thing down here that’s truly hers, and he’s gonna take even that from her. Persephone feels stripped bare. Nowhere to go. She swallows. “If I do the broadcasts, you’ll let the speakeasy alone?”

“Aye,” he says, the tension draining out of his shoulders. “You got my word, as your husband.”

Those words send some violent anger shuddering up through her heart. The man in front of her ain’t her husband. Her husband got lost somewhere between winters, and in his place is this cruel king who’s got the whole of the dead leashed in one hand and her leashed in the other. She says, quietly, “Your word ain’t worth shit, Mister Hades.”

And she holds herself together exactly long enough to watch him leave.

She staggers into the speakeasy later, three sheets to the wind, and slump down on a bench. Reaches for a bottle, and don’t even bother a damned glass this time around. She’s got half the mind she might just go at it until she either passes out or hurls her guts up. Whichever comes first.

The hours slip by in that haze. Suddenly there is a glass of water being shoved under her nose. She tries to push it away, slurs something, and she ain’t even sure what she’s tryna say. Her vision is blurry. She sits up and immediately feels bile rush up in the back of her throat, hot acid flush. She keels over and pukes on the floor until her whole mouth is burning something foul. Someone’s hands are holding back her hair, and at first she thinks it’s her husband. She mumbles at them to get off her. But when those hands finally help her back into her seat, and hold that glass of water to her lips, she sees it’s only Mister Hermes. There’s a real sad look on his face. He says, “Better take it easy there, sister.”

“_You _take it easy,” she snaps, tongue moving thickly round the syllables. She swallows the water too quickly and coughs a little. Mister Hermes just waits, real patient and real quiet, until she’s recovered.

“What’s got you down?” he asks gently.

“Bastard got me wrapped up in his foul propaganda,” she spits, words coming out in a disorganised tumble. “Radio broadcasts. Threatened to close the damn speakeasy.”

“I can see how that might get to you,” Mister Hermes says mildly, sliding onto a stool beside her and steepling his fingers.

She mumbles some half-baked insult about that shiny suit of his and paws at the glass. God. She ain’t been this past it for a while. Feels like the whole world is spinning with her at the axis. It’s all coming flooding out. She says, “I’m gonna leave for good. Gonna get on that damned train and I ain’t coming back. Fuck the seasons, fuck my vows, I ain’t doing this for another minute—”

Mister Hermes swiftly holds out a bowl, and she hurls into it again. Chokes on the vile taste.

“—thanks,” she mutters to him. he sets the bowl aside without comment. That’s Mister Hermes for you. He ain’t one to judge. God of vagabonds and wanderers and the lost, friend to even the most woebegone of souls.

He says, patiently, “Aye, you might leave, sister. But what good would that do the folk stuck down here? Most ain’t got the option of a return ticket.”

Persephone starts to protest, but it dies on her lips. She stares at the countertop, head swimming. He’s right. She got a duty to the dead as much as she got a duty to the living, and she can’t abandon them to the tyrant her husband’s become. Not when Hadestown’s closer to hell than anywhere else. She wipes her nose and nods. Straightens up, doing her best to shake off the fog.

“Aye,” she says slowly. “But what can I do?”

“You’ll think of something, I wager,” Mister Hermes says. his eyes glimmer with humour. “Perhaps when you’re a little more sober, eh?”

She nods. Stares at the glass of water and thinks, Lord give me strength, because I ain’t got much left. But I got a duty. I got a duty.

Hell is not iron and fumes; Hell is the whine of the radio static and the sound of her husband’s voice, too loud, reverberating from all around. Using his _business _voice, which is all she hears these days. No gentleness to moderate it. Hell is standing beside him while he gives that speech, day after day. Hell is watching the dead cheer and bellow along with him, this ugly song they share, because somewhere along the line her husband figured out that he don’t have to make his workers like him – he just has to make sure they hate someone else more.

She wants to go home. She wants to go somewhere where the underground don’t press in over her head, where the air ain’t stained with grit and coal-dust, where the endless hum and clap of the machines don’t tap and tap and tap away in the back of her mind. But Hell is knowing that this place is part of her, all twisted up and tangled through her ribs, and that no matter how much she wants it, she can’t leave. She wants to go home…but she _is _home.

This place’s ugliness is inside her, too, the same as her husband. The drink drags it out, foul and dark, on the bad days. She wishes she could take a lighter to it, burn it off like ethanol. But it keeps close hold on her, a weight on her shoulder, an albatross hanging heavy at her neck. It worsens when her husband is around. They feed off one another, dragging the other down with each little cruelty.

Like today: the pilot light ain’t igniting the stovetop. Persephone flips the switch on and off. Then she sets down her glass of wine to tug at the panel with a hiss, trying to get the piping under the hobs. She swears under her breath.

“What is it?” Hades asks, from where he’s fixing himself what’s gotta be his sixth cup of coffee that day.

“Nothing,” she snaps.

“It’s that pilot light again, ain’t it?” he says.

She ignores him, and tries flipping the switch again. Nothing. She crouches down and unlatches the front panel. Inside is a maze of piping and wires, and the pilot light flickering obstinately blue in its nook.

“Let me take a look,” Hades says behind her. “It’s probably just an issue with the flash piping. All they need is a little adjustment, if I just—"

“Go away. I can do it myself,” she snaps, scowling up at him.

“I’m just trying to help,” he says.

“Well, don’t,” she says.

He sighs, and says acidly, “Fine. Make sure you don’t blow us all up while you’re fiddling around with the gas.”

“What the hell is your problem?” she demands, straightening up to glare at him proper. He ain’t got any right being so rude.

“_You’re _my problem,” he snaps. “Why do you have to be so stubborn all the time? Why are you so afraid of admitting you need help?”

She narrows her eyes, kenning his implication. This is an argument about her drinking now as much as this damned stove top. Plucks an old nerve that still gets her fired up. “Because you always come in here, all high and mighty, acting like you’re gonna solve everything with a wave of your hand!”

“I don’t—”

“You do! And I got news for you: sometimes there are problems you can’t fix, because you damn well created them in the first place.”

She ain’t talking about the pilot light anymore. He stares at her. Then he says, “Are you blaming me for your drinking problem?”

“Well, I didn’t come outta the womb like this, did I?” she says tartly.

“Unbelievable,” he growls. “Don’t blame me for your lack of self-restraint. This is on _you_.”

“Oh, you don’t gotta explain my own issues to me, believe me,” she says with a sour laugh.

“Really? Cause I don’t see you making any effort to damn well fix it,” he snaps.

She slams a fist down on the stove-top, emotion swelling up in her throat. She can’t tell if it’s rage or anguish, just that she can barely speak for the way it surges forth. Her voice cracks. “You think I haven’t _tried_? I have, again and again, but this place is hell and it’s _killing _me!”

“All I have ever done is for you!” he says, somewhere between furious and desperate. “I have given everything to you and all you’ve ever done is throw it back in my face!”

“You’re not listening to me!” she snatches up her glass of wine and takes a gulp.

“Put that damn thing down. You need to stop doing this to yourself!”

He reaches for the glass, pulling it away. She keeps tight hold of it, pulling roughly against his grip. She snarls, “Leave me alone!”

She wrenches away from him – and hurls the glass to the floor. Glass sprays. Wine sprays red. Flecked among the shards like blood. Splattered on both their shoes. She sees it shining like ink across the black hem of her dress. She stares numbly, unable to believe herself.

And her husband ain’t looking at the glass. Watching her, stricken. She meets his eyes, and for a moment they are both dumbstruck. Then he turns on his heels and walks out of the kitchen. Leaving Persephone alone, with broken glass all around her feet.

The next day Persephone silently takes her suitcase and disappears off to board the train, in the moment where the underworld catches its breath after the day’s broadcast. She don’t even say goodbye. But Mister Hades watches his workers unfold from the trance of the song and he thinks, perhaps this power is worth that price. He returns to his office, shrugging out of his jacket and folding it neatly over the back of the chair. His mug of coffee is cold where he left it on the desk. The light hanging above hums a little; he’s been meaning to replace the bulb but never got round to it.

Out of habit he notes the calendar – and stops, staring at the date. It ain’t springtime yet. His lady left a week early. He’d lost track of time.

A sick feeling coils in his chest. Maybe he’s done it. Maybe he’s finally gone too far, pushed her all the way to the edge, finally snapped the tether. Maybe she ain’t gonna come back. And in spite of the misery they put each other through, there’s a slow howling anguish that seizes up his heart at that thought. He collapses into his chair and stares at the pile of papers on the desk. There’s a callus right on the upper joint of his ring finger, where his pen rubs at the toughened skin. He rubs it absently. He can’t do this without her. All this time, it’s been the thought of her that’s driven him on, and without that, he don’t think he can stand the thought of eternity.

He passes a lonely summer down below. The dead man the assembly line, day in, day out. They sing Mister Hades’ song. One day he comes home to that empty hollow house, and he stands in the doorway of his wife’s bedroom. The whole room is a mess, her clothes strewn over the furniture and across the floor, a vase of wilting daisies drooping on the bedside. Dried petals fallen around the base, curling and rotted brown. Mister Hades picks up an empty glass, which has something foul and amber half-evaporated in the bottom, and takes it back to the kitchen.

He ain’t able to shake her from his mind. Her absence bites worse than her presence ever could. He takes to pouring himself an extra glass of whisky in the evenings, because when the lights are flickering low and his eyes have been open for far too long, the numbers slip away from him. He finds himself reading and rereading the same words without comprehension, twisting the wedding band on his finger.

Come February, he leaves to fetch her. He’s a few days early. But, he thinks, it don’t matter. The upper world has had its share of the sun.

All it takes is a little push. The cycle is off-kilter; tipping like a gyroscope as it whirls on a tabletop. Dipping closer and closer to the ground until it crashes in a heap, and don’t turn no more. Winter comes earlier and lingers too long, while Mister Hades holds onto his lady for days and then weeks longer than he oughta. Summer bursts in too hot and too fast, like a flash-fire through dry bush, before vanishing again beneath the ground.

And other years, summer languishes, reluctant, all the way into autumn. The earth withers and rots at the sugar-sweet bottom of the barrel, while the sun beats down upon the fields and the people’s backs. The winter in her wake is always vicious, and reclaims the earth howling. Teeth bared. Frostbite.

Hera says, fanning her face, "I know more than anyone that no marriage is perfect. But the two of you don't need to make it the whole world's problem."

"I ain't the one conducting the bloody train," Persephone just grumbles, and takes another drink.

And later, when she’s been dragged back to the dead, she’ll tell her husband they can’t do this anymore. She’ll tell him people are dying up there. She’ll tell them that her ma ain’t able to work fields that have been destroyed by frost and fire.

“The living are no concern of mine,” Hades says darkly.

“Then do it for _me_,” she snaps.

“You got a duty to the dead too,” he tells her. And unspoken, though she still hears it: _you got a duty to _me_. _

“Bluebeard,” she snarls, with all the hatred left in her. A mourning cry. “You ain’t any better than my captor!”

And a long time ago, that mighta stung him. But his hard face don’t flinch. Hades Polydegmon, the Hospitable One, says with a voice cold as iron, “You made a vow.”

It takes one look from reverend Demeter, and Persephone feels it all come spilling out.

"What has he done to you, child?" her mother asks.

She'd asked that exact thing in another lifetime, another story, to a much younger girl, with the taste of pomegranate still honey-sweet where the Hospitable One had pressed the seeds to her lips.

"Nothing I ain't done to myself," Persephone mutters, slumping down in the rickety wooden chair at the dining room table. She thumbs the flask. The patina's worn down dull from all these years in her hand. She tips her head back, letting out a puff of breath. "Hadestown's gone to the dogs, ma."

She glosses over the worst of the details. The radio, the broken glass, the nights she spends with her hand curled around a bottle. Daughter sanding down the sharp edges so her mother don’t fret too much. But Demeter ain’t stupid. She listens, clear-eyed, and she can likely tell where those raw hems are.

"You need to speak to him," Demeter says, when the story is done. At Persephone's derisive snort, she sighs. "That ain't a joke, girl. Have a real conversation, without that damn flask mediatin' for once."

"He won't listen," Persephone says with sudden urgency, straightening up and looking right at her mother. "You think I haven't tried? Might as well speak with that damn wall of his, for the amount of good it'll do."

"Then try again. And again. However long it takes," Demeter says firmly. You know what they call her? Praxidike: exacter of justice. Demeter Lawgiver. Her tone is hard, but when she reaches across the table to takes her daughter's hand, her touch is gentle. "You're bound to that place, girl. As it rots, so will you. You wanna fix Hadestown? You better start with _yourself_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next up: finally some EURYDICE CONTENT


	5. it's an old song

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok ok ok here we go  
I wanted to avoid covering ground that the musical already covers so much of this is focused on missing scenes and developing Persephone's arc. Also eurydice is there hell YES  
Tw for alcoholism. Also for more discussion of the original persephone myth and the dubious consent that goes along with that.

There's a new face in the little town clustered around the railway station. A young woman with dark eyes and short, choppy hair, weather-worn boots and the weary, wary manner of a body ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble.

"What's your name, girl?" Persephone asks, kicking back in her chair and watching her over the rim of her glass.

"Eurydice," the girl says. She's pretty, with charming roughness. A wry twist of her lips, the way she slouches in her chair and takes up as much space as she can. She eyes up the silver flask sitting on the table, and, eyes not leaving Persephone's, reaches forward and snatches it up. She tips it to her lips and sets it back down with a thud. "That’s good shit. Gin?"

"My ma used to have juniper trees growing out the back of our house," Persephone says. "Reminds me of home."

"Home," Eurydice echoes, like the word is foreign to her. "Why don't you go back there?"

"That's the damn question, ain't it?" Persephone says with a sad smile, taking a long draught from her cup.

The train whistles, high and cold. Everything ends, including summer. Mister Hermes gives Persephone a pat on the shoulder. "Don't bite each other's heads off down there," he says lightly, but they both know it's not really a joke.

The Hospitable One shadows the carriage door, and steps out onto the platform. With those dark glasses covering his eyes, he's inscrutable.

"You're early," Persephone snarls at him.

"I missed ya," he says sardonically. He holds out his hand, palm open. She fixes him with a glare, and then places her hand in his. Real gentle, like placing her hand in a bear trap.

There is a pause. They have an audience: Mister Hermes, his young poet, the other townsfolk. And Eurydice, watching the two gods the same way she watches someone serving her food. Wary - and hungry.

"Kind of makes you wonder how it feels," she murmurs to Orpheus, a little too loud.

Persephone shoots her a warning glance, but it's too late. The Hospitable One heard it too, and he lowers those dark glasses of his to take a look at the girl. He smiles slowly. Eurydice stares right back at him. Persephone wants to tell the girl to lower her gaze, to make herself unremarkable, not to stray near death's deadly flower waiting in the field - but panic stops up her lungs. Time is suspended for an instant: young girl staring down the king of the underworld, Persephone's heart in her throat.

Then the train howls and the tension shatters. The Hospitable One pushes his glasses back up and closes his fingers around his wife's hand. Orpheus wraps his arms around Eurydice as if to guard her. Death leads Summer onto the train, and the door clicks shut behind them.

In a kinder world they both would've forgotten that hungry young girl behind them.

The King in the Mine keeps his hold on Hadestown tight and unyielding. Suffocating with every hiss of the radio. Persephone stands at her husband’s side, gripping the railing with white knuckles, while she looks over the factory floor. His voice rings out low and harsh like the sky clearing its throat before a lightning flash: "Why do we build the wall, my children?"

The voices of the dead in mindless chorus: "We build the wall to keep us free!"

Persephone's voice among them, just a shade shy of a whisper: "We build the wall to keep us free."

And there - the warehouse doors thud. Floorboards bend beneath worn boots. Persephone is suspended in the fog of the radio static and the workers droning and her husband's voice, thundering and terrible. She stares numbly at the newcomer walking into the factory. The world has been wrenched out from under her, noise crowds out her thoughts. Eurydice is here.

No. This ain’t right. She can’t be.

A pause for breath. The girl is caught in the middle of the workers. She looks up. Eyes dart to Persephone, and then to her husband looming above them all.

Hades leans into the radio receiver. His voice softens, when he finds Eurydice in the crowd, to something almost tender: "What do we have that they should want, my children?"

"A wall to work upon!" the dead call, rising up into a frenzy. Eurydice is shrinking among them. Their eyes are empty and their mouths are wide open and they chant and chant and chant like the words matter more than the air in their hollow lungs.

And when her husband puts down the receiver and the assembly unwinds - slowly, the workers still buzzing, moving back to work like stragglers at a late-night party - Eurydice is coming up the stairs. Hands in her pockets. Something hunted in her eyes.

Persephone unclamps her fingers from the railing. Flexes them as they ache. Eurydice passes her without meeting her gaze, goes right to Hades. The bravado from the railway station is gone now. Just a hungry girl in a strange and alien new world.

"Now what?" Eurydice says to Hades, and her voice is brittle.

"There are papers to be signed," he says, and he gestures at the big wooden doors behind her. He inclines his head. "Step into my office."

The dead number in millions. Far too many to all go to see the boss man in person. _Special treatment_. Eurydice finally looks up at Persephone, then, and her face has a mixture of apology and that hunger of hers written all over it. Here is what Eurydice says, without words, to the queen: _I will do what I have to._

Here is what Persephone would say to her, if she could: _I know._

And Hades pulls the door open and ushers the girl inside. He looks at Persephone, and with pointed deliberateness, uses one hand to loosen his tie from his throat. And then he turns, and closes the door behind him.

A lifetime ago, there was a girl wandering in a meadow, picking wildflowers. And she stumbled across a poppy, deep red as blood staining a battlefield. She picked it - and unknowingly accepted an offer of courtship by the man who'd left it there. She was seized up and dragged beneath the earth, to a kingdom filled with the dead.

Girls stolen away.

Girls forced into contracts they do not know the full terms of.

Girls who have no choice but to let themselves be tied to the underground.

When Persephone thinks of Eurydice, she feels as if she's been rent in two.

When she thinks of the god Hades had once been - and the man she'd thought he was now - she feels utterly wounded. She'd thought he'd changed. She thought, this time around, the story was different.

Mister Hades closes the door. He goes to those old filing cabinets and he pulls out the boilerplate contracts that the Eumenides have drawn up, in their artful cruel legality. Sets the papers down on the desk and sweeps his hand out, gesturing for the girl to sit.

She wavers, and then does. He circles the desk and shrugs out of his suit jacket, tugs off his tie, before sitting opposite her. He says, “Take your time.”

Eurydice swallows. Looks so small, in that huge chair, in front of that huge slab of a desk. This place is gonna devour her whole. Mister Hades feels a twinge of guilt, thinking about the contents of that contract. It’s easy enough when his employees are faceless, when he ain’t the one sitting them down and telling them when to sign. He don’t see that part, high up here in his office.

The girl picks up the papers and starts to read. Pretty face etched with a frown as she makes her way, steadily, through the clauses. When she’s finished, she looks up at Mister Hades, and there is that same expression on her face that had ensnared him up top. Mistrust, but curiosity there too. Hunger.

That hunger is what caught his notice. Such a pretty young thing, but she got a hard heart and that hankering for _more_. Always more. He knows it, just by looking at her, because old Mister Hades, he’s just the same. Hunger like that will always push a body down a path few are willing to tread.

Perhaps he chose her because he knew she’d be an easy target: alone and in need. Or perhaps he chose her because he wanted to know just how far that girl’s hunger would go. Or really, perhaps the choice had nothing to do with the girl at all, and everything to do with the fact that he knew his wife would be watching. This is a performance: if he can’t have Persephone’s love, he’ll settle for her jealousy.

“Where do I sign?” Eurydice asks quietly.

Mister Hades gives her his good fountain pen. He circles the desk to stand over her shoulder, and with great care, reaches out and places his hand over hers. Her skin is cold, knuckles reddened and chapped, rough as his once were in far younger days. Her breath quickens, but she doesn’t recoil. She lets him guide her hand, real gentle, to rest over the dotted line.

“Is this what you want?” he murmurs, and he’s talking about both the contract and something else that neither of them will express aloud.

Eurydice doesn’t look up at him. This close, he can smell the cheap lanolin soap she must’ve been using in her hair. She says, softly, “Does it matter?”

Mister Hades kneels beside the chair at her side. Tall man like himself, they’re eye-to-eye this way. He says gravely, “Aye, songbird. It matters.”

Eurydice’s eyes are dark, expression unreadable. Hand still rests on the table, clutching the fountain pen. Mister Hades is close enough to see the darkened circles beneath her eyes, the chapped edges of her lips. This ain’t a girl used to such luxuries as _choice_.

Worse men than himself have denied girls that much.

Worse men than himself might note the closeness of their faces and close that distance. Worse men might reach out and place a gentle hand on that girl’s cheek, feel her pulse thrumming under her skin. Mister Hades considers it. For a long moment they are both quiet, Eurydice watching him carefully, knuckles turning white as she grips that pen in her hands.

“I’ll sign it,” she says, lifting her chin. Heavy tone like she’s giving permission – or like she’s resigned herself to what she expects will come next. She leans forward, perhaps unconsciously, and Mister Hades is unable to stop himself from reaching out and brushing a strand of hair from her eyes. Her lashes flutter. He is painfully aware of their proximity now, and for a moment the temptation tugs at him.

His gut twists. This ain’t right. It don’t matter if he tells her this is a choice: to her, it could never be. Starving girls don’t have a luxury of turning down an open palm, no matter who is offering. And faintly, in that ancient part of himself that he tries his best to ignore at every turn, he hears the echo of an old story. He feels the ruby shell of a pomegranate cracking beneath his fingers, the seeds falling deadly into his palms. He hears the promise of a young man to the Old Woman of the Harvest: _do nothing to her that she will not allow. _

He pushes that ancient godhead back to the dark pit it came crawling out of. Mister Hades might not be the kindest of men, but he ain’t _that_. Not anymore. That ain’t a story that needs to be retold. He made a promise.

He draws back abruptly and stands. Eurydice’s eyes widen in surprise. He turns away and immediately reaches for the decanter of whisky. Sloshes it into a glass and knocks it back with a heavy sigh. God help him. God help this poor girl. He should have never brought her down here.

Persephone must think he’s some particular monster. He is realising that his actions likely didn’t provoke her jealousy, but her anger. And there is still some bitter part of him that thinks, _good_, because in some way he wishes she would go one day and never come back, so that he could be left down here to rot with the dead in peace.

“You’ll start on the next shift in the factory,” Mister Hades tells Eurydice, and his own voice sounds foreign in his ears.

There is a long pause. The scrape of that pen against the paper as she wordlessly signs it. Mister Hades turns to find her watching him again, this time with confusion and perhaps concern. She opens her mouth as if to ask a question, and then shuts it again. Pushes herself out of that chair and lingers by it uncertainly.

“Go,” Mister Hades says, voice rough with emotion. “You’re free.”

Eurydice filters into the speakeasy with the other workers a few nights later. First Persephone's seen of her, since watching her disappear into that office. Girl looks run through. Got the same empty eyes as the rest of the shades, now. The hunger that had once breathed such life into her is gone. When her eyes find Persephone's across the room, there is only the barest flash of recognition in them.

He took _everything_ from her. Persephone sets down her glass with a hard thud, and rises from her seat to slip behind the bar. There is a glass bottle on the shelf, barely a palm's length tall, stoppered tightly, filled with clear liquid that glints in the dim lamplight.

Persephone mixes it in with some tonic and a spike or three of gin. Beckons to the girl as she drifts towards the bar. "You look like you could use a drink, sister," Persephone says, setting the glass down. "House special. Go on."

Of all the underworld's rivers, only one is truly safe to drink from: the Mnemosyne, river of memory. The girl raises the glass to her lips, when she sets it down she is Eurydice, clear-eyed, and breathless.

"Feel a little more like yourself?" Persephone asks with a lopsided smile.

"Yeah," Eurydice says, watching her uncertainly.

"Come on. We'll go somewhere a little quieter."

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing Persephone says. Shuts the door, sets her drink down on the table.

Eurydice stares at her. “For what?”

Persephone pulls out a chair and sits down on it heavily. Tries to build up the courage to say the words. She says, finally, “For what he did to you.”

Eurydice slumps down into the chair. And to her surprise, the girl laughs. A little sad, a little bitter. The sound of a girl utterly unsurprised that the world found a new way to screw her over. Eurydice says, “It’s funny. When you think about it, I woulda froze to death anyway. Your man just offered me a kinder way out.”

“I ain’t talking about that,” Persephone says. She don’t echo the girl’s black humour. Deadly serious, now. Face grim. “Girl, I know what men are like, when they want something.”

Maybe not in this life, at least. But in another: sweet pomegranate seeds pressed to her lips by cold fingers. It’s an old song and Lady Persephone ain’t never quite forgotten it. Eurydice is quiet. Stares at the drink in her hands like she’s a million miles away. Then without looking up, she says, “He didn’t hurt me.”

Persephone wants to take the girl’s face in her hands and beg her to speak plainly. She swallows. When she speaks, her voice hitches. “You don’t have to defend him. You can tell me the truth, sister.”

“In what world would I have a reason to defend that man?” Eurydice demands, looking up at her. “I’m not lying. He gave me those papers to sign, touched my hands, real gentle, and then I _thought _he was gonna—it don’t matter what I thought. Whatever he had on his mind going in, he lost the stomach for it as soon as he started it.”

Now it is Persephone’s turn to stare. “You swear you ain’t lying to me?”

“Are you so eager to believe your man’s a monster?” Eurydice asks.

“Ain’t he?” Persephone shoots back. She is thinking of the factories, those damned boilerplates, the wall, the hellish broadcasts. The dead little more than slaves, stuck day in and day out on his assembly line. She is thinking of the way he loosened his tie before he followed that girl inside his office: she knows what he wanted her to believe. It don’t line up.

“Not the kind you’re thinking of,” Eurydice says.

Persephone ain’t got a clue what to say, so she just tips back the rest of her drink all at once and shuts her eyes as her throat burns. Maybe her husband ain’t as far gone as she’d thought. At the very least, maybe he ain’t still the Hospitable One who snatched that young goddess from the meadow. That hope is too much for her to bear.

“Orpheus said the two of you were once in love. Is that true?” Eurydice asks quietly, long after their silence settles. Thumbs her glass of memory with one roughened hand.

“Aye, it was,” Persephone says dully. And uncertainty – and hope – coil in her gut. She adds softly, like she don’t dare believe it, “I think we still are.”

Because perhaps love is seeing someone at their worst and still coming back, again and again, because you still think that maybe this time it’ll be better. She swallows the sudden swell of emotion in her throat: longing and anguish and that reckless foolish hope that she can’t beat back.

Eurydice nods. She asks, “Will I remember this?”

“Maybe. That depends on you,” Persephone says.

“Oh,” Eurydice says thinly, and she sinks back in her chair. “I remembered nothing before. Like I was gone from myself.”

Poor girl. Persephone reminds herself that her husband is the one who did this to her. That though he ain’t as monstrous as she’d thought, he still got a streak of something cruel running through him. She rises to her feet with sudden fervour. “Come dance with me.”

Eurydice laughs nervously. Like she’s not sure if it’s a joke or not. “What for?”

“Does it matter? Save a little joy for yourself tonight, sister,” Persephone says, holding out her hand. Palm up. An invitation. “Just cause you’re dead don’t mean you gotta act like it.”

A little smile builds on Eurydice’s face. She fixes Persephone with a strange look that she can’t quite place. Then, deliberately, she sets her hand in hers.

Here is the dance: sharp and wild, staccato beat, breathless. Persephone leads, Eurydice follows, and they swing back and forth, forth and back around the place where their fingers intertwine. And by the time the song ends, the last of the Mnemosyne has drained away, and they are just Summer and the dead girl clinging on to every last moment of that dance for dear life. She blinks up at the Lady of the Underground, disoriented, caught in the clouds. The dead girl says, “I’m so tired.”

“I know, darling,” Persephone says kindly, guiding her to sit at the bar and giving her some water. Fresh water. No memories in this one. “We all are.”

There is a word for a journey into the underworld: _katabasis_. Persephone has her own, year after year. Hermes too, moving back and forth between the veil. But it is something that very few mortals attempt. Even fewer succeed, because above all, a katabasis requires one thing: returning once more to the world of the living. She’d thought Orpheus a fool. But then she heard him sing to the workers, and now she thinks, just maybe, this boy might make it.

Her head is spinning. Through the fog of inebriation she tries to gather her scattered thoughts. She is on the verge of something. A realisation: she cannot go on like this. _They _cannot go on like this.

How long has it been? Stagnating and stuck in this revolving broken cycle, making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Habitually she reaches for her flask, and then stops. Stares at it: the place where the dulled patina has worn into the metal, the smudges of her lipstick stains around the rim. What has she become, this wreck of a woman who can’t stand her own company without the aid of drink? A woman who walked from her problems, who could have done something and instead chose to drown herself because that was easier?

She thinks: _I have been so absorbed in my own pain that I have spared no thought for the pain of others_.

She thinks: _this can’t go on._

She thumbs the worn metal. Takes a deep breath. And then she tosses the flask aside into the dirt. For a moment her heart jumps in her throat, a frantic burst of panic that screeches _I need that I need that_—but she digs her nails into her palms and pushes that panic down as far as she can. She don’t need the flask anymore. If she can help it, she’ll never need it again.

And Lady Persephone marches up the stairs to speak with that damned husband of hers, because she’s starting to be sure that he ain’t the monster he’s pretending to be.

The factories are filled with noise. But it is not the clash of hammers and the rumble of the machines. It is the sound of voices. Orpheus has given the dead back their tongues, reminded them that they are human, and they are furious.

“One, two, is it true?” they bellow. Workers tear apart their equipment, overturn tables, rattle their hammers against the walls like war drums. Orpheus stands in the middle of it all, watching his work in awe. He has planted the seed and now it is blooming furiously.

And beside him is Eurydice, clutching his hand in hers. She is not shouting with the rest, but her gaze is hard when she looks up at the King and Queen of the Underworld. The lovers push to the head of the crowd. The Fates block the stairs up to the landing. Orpheus calls to Hades, voice carrying crystal clear even amongst the din, “We wish to be heard!”

Hades laughs, low and mocking. “Young man, you’re either very brave or very stupid, if you think _this _is all it’ll take to get your girl back.”

The sound fills Persephone with ice. She rounds on Hades, eyes flashing. “Listen to yourself, husband!” She casts a hand out to the riot spilling through the warehouse doors. “Look at what you’ve become. Let the boy speak.”

Hades holds her gaze. His jaw sets as he registers her betrayal. His voice is filled with poisonous irony when he turns back to Orpheus. “It seems your song’s made quite the impression on my wife,” he says, and then his voice lowers to threatening depth, “It’ll take more than a song to stand against a king, son.”

Fate is a bull-headed thing, and those words are like waving a red scarf right in its face. Orpheus looks grimly to the Moirai blocking his path. He looks to Eurydice, standing silent at his side. And he opens his mouth, and he begins to sing.

His voice is the missing piece of a melody. It strings the shouts of the workers together, darting between the dissonant tones, a fluid leap from cacophony into unearthly furious symphony. The song surges up like a rising tide against the air. Orpheus sticks out a hand and the Fates part to let him through. He limps determinedly up the stairs, Eurydice at his side, while his song echoes and swells all around them.

The boy stands face-to-face with the king, and asks, “Will you listen?”

Hades is dumbstruck; Persephone can see it on his face. For a single agonising moment it seems he might cave. But then his face hardens and he lifts a pale hand like a conductor, sweeps it through the air in a sharp fluid motion. And the song dies on every worker’s lips. They sag, heads lolling, eyes blinking and clouded with sudden disorientation. A susurrus builds, as their dull murmurs overlap and fall into line. _Keep your head low_ _keep your head low keep your head—_

Persephone had once demanded the Eumenides show her the contracts the workers all signed. A malignant boilerplate with fine-print squeezed into every footer and too many clauses to properly read through. Alekto had explained how it worked though, with sinister glee: Mister Hades owns ‘em, see? Not just their work and not just their hands, but their tongues and their eyes and their thoughts and their hearts and their _souls_, right down to the very core.

_–keep your head low keep your head low keep your head low keep your head low—_

Eurydice sways in place, but Orpheus is gripping her hand tight. She is staring at Hades, like she’s making a calculation.

_–keep your head low keep your head—_

“Songbird, you really wanna throw your lot in with this poor boy?” Hades asks her, gentle tone more sinister than any raised voice. Orpheus stiffens, grips Eurydice tight. “We made a deal, if you’ll recall.”

Eurydice wavers. Eyes flick to Orpheus, then to Hades. She takes a deep breath, and her shoulders tremble, like if she opens her mouth she might shatter. But her voice is hard as flint. She says, “If I stay, will you let him go unharmed?”

No. _No_. Persephone steps between her husband and the girl, plants her hands on both Eurydice’s shoulders. “You can’t give up,” she pleads with her. “Sister, you still have a chance. Don’t waste it.”

“Step aside, wife,” Hades says sharply.

Eurydice meets Persephone’s eyes. She says quietly, “I can’t change my fate.”

“How are you to know what your fate is?” Persephone says desperately. “Don’t go down my path. Don’t go down _his_,” – and here she means her husband, walling himself away, making himself cold and cruel as the rest of the world – “There is _nothing_ that love can’t change.”

And something flares to life in Eurydice’s eyes: an old hunger. It is not just hunger for food, for warmth, for love, Persephone realises, but a hunger for _freedom_ that drives this girl. She presses a fierce kiss to Eurydice’s brow, perhaps for luck, and Eurydice clutches tight at her hand.

Then Persephone whirls to face her husband. She snarls, “I know you’re better than this. We were happy once; it’s not too late.”

“That was a long ago,” Hades says bitterly. He looks over her shoulder at Eurydice and Orpheus. “Everyone turns on you in the end.”

“No. Not everyone,” comes Eurydice’s voice. She glances at Orpheus and lifts her chin, drawing new strength from him. Fixes Hades and Persephone with a look of defiant hope, and opens her mouth, and begins to sing.

It only takes a moment for Orpheus to remember his voice. Together the lovers sing, sweet and high as bells. For a moment it seems the sound may be drowned out by the drone of the workers – but then Orpheus raises his voice and Hades’ control _shatters _with the sharp resounding clash of a hammer down below – voices clamour out one by one, joining Orpheus in harmonious chorus blooming wide and brilliant as the springtime.

Hades lets out an audible gasp. Persephone laughs breathlessly as the workers rally. Was Orpheus’ song so strong it could defy the very law of this place? The cracks are showing in the wall. Sunlight streaming in between the bricks. The riot crests, the clamour rising, and Orpheus and Eurydice trail off their song to watch in awe as the dead call for freedom.

They’re distracted. Hades has moved; Persephone realises too late that he’s at the power board, hands on the radio receiver. He flicks a switch and twists a dial and then feedback screeches all across the speakers, a hideous dissonant wail that drowns out the song. The static flashes and the circuits buzz, louder and louder. Persephone’s hands fly to her ears and she staggers backwards. Her husband lifts the receiver to his lips and thunders, “This city is **_mine_**.”

They reel. Orpheus and Eurydice stagger back, barely holding one another up; the workers fall into shocked stupor. Dead silence in the aftermath of the storm. Cold high screech of tinnitus in Persephone’s ears. She blinks and staggers and realises that the lights had gone out for a moment. They flicker back on again. The whole room wavers, panting for breath, all eyes on Hades. The King of the Underworld is quiet, as he next speaks. But it is the sort of quiet of a man who does not need to raise his voice to be heard – and obeyed.

“Young man,” he says to Orpheus, lip curling. “I’m not unreasonable. I’ll hear you out, before I throw you to the dogs. Show me why my wife’s such a _fan_: sing for me, poet.”

And Orpheus does.

The song is _I forgive you _and _I’m sorry _in a single breath.

Here is that day in the orchard: poor girl with her straw hat shading her brow as she reaches through the branches, green leaves brushing her wrists as she plucks the fruit from their stems. And a poor boy with dirt under his nails, caught in the act of stealing his next meal. The girl doesn’t holler for her ma like she oughta. The boy doesn’t make a run for it, as might be prudent for a trespasser. Their first kiss tastes like stolen peaches.

Persephone never forgot how the story went the last time. Always felt the bloody stain of pomegranate laced into her godhead. But hearing Orpheus’ melody sets her spinning. She suddenly remembers why, an age ago, she’d been so confident telling her mother that her Hades was different this time around. And she realises, watching tears stream down her husband’s cheeks, that the man she’d believed in had always been there. Just got buried in the ruin of their marriage.

Shake off the rubble, shake off the dust. Hades holds out the flower to her, and she takes it. Tucks it gently into his lapel, right about his heart. Neither of them have the words for this, but they know each other so well that they don’t need to say a thing.

Here is what they both know: she cannot let go of her duty for him. He cannot let go of his duty for her. They cannot stray from the paths nature has set for them; those steel tracks that they run between life and death. But they’ll do what they can, within the space that Fate has allotted them. There will always be those brief six months when they align, as the moon brushes the sun’s face in an eclipse, before it is pulled away again by the turning sky.

Orpheus asks, “Can we go?”

Hades can’t let Eurydice go. He could waive the contract and set her free and it still wouldn’t change the fact that she’s _dead_. Thread plucked from the tapestry, snipped clean with Atropos’ gleaming scissors. Persephone knows this, but it hurts all the same when he says, “I don’t know.”

Her husband looks to her. Looks to the workers, watching the opera unfold above them with confusion and awe. Looks to the Fates, circling at the edge of the scene like vultures watching a dog stagger on its last legs. He is making a calculation.

“The law is clear. The dead cannot simply walk out of this place,” he says finally, with all the weariness of a king. The lovers exchange panicked looks. Then Hades turns away to the table, and pulls out a sheet of paper and a fountain pen. Writes four lines in that careful blocky print of his; no Eumenides to draft this contract. And then he holds it out to Orpheus, and says, “But if you prove yourself…perhaps God will look kindly on my discretion.”

Orpheus reads the contract. He frowns. He shows it Eurydice. They turn away from the gods in private conference. Persephone watches it all, heart in her throat. She looks to her husband, and says, “What does that say?”

He smiles sadly at her. “The hardest thing in the world to overcome is doubt,” he says. He twists the ring on his finger. Even through it all, he hadn’t taken it off. “Especially when you ain’t got a companion to steady yourself against.”

Persephone says, “But you’re letting them go?”

“I’m letting them try.”

Orpheus and Eurydice sign the contract. Grim-faced, determined. As they walk from the warehouse, Fate close at their heel, the workers reach out to brush their shoulders and hands. The dead are quiet now, but it is not the close-iron suffocated quiet of the contract. It is the quiet of people filled with hope. Orpheus has left them with life, down here in dark.

Later, when the lovers are long-gone, Hades goes to see his wife off on the train for the first time in years. The platform is crowded with shades. Mister Hermes, silver suit a-flashing, herds the newly dead into queues.

There is only one passenger making the return trip up top. Persephone, fur-coat slung over one arm, suitcase strangely light of the glass bottles that once weighed it down. Maybe another year, her husband will ride with her once more. But seeing the state of the dead, even Persephone knows it probably ain’t wise for him to leave his kingdom unattended.

They pause at the doors. Persephone reaches up and pulls a flower from her hair, and tucks it gently into her husband’s lapel. His face crinkles in a smile. For the first time in centuries, Persephone wishes she could stay down here for a little longer.

Hades hums Orpheus’ song softly. Here is what it means: this is something worth saving. It is worth trying again.

“Wait for me?” Persephone asks.

Her husband’s hands slip from hers, as the train rumbles to life. He says, “I will.”

Lady Persephone’s got the shakes from being sober this long. She grips her suitcase tight to keep her hands from tremoring. Reality hits like a brick in the face, without the filter of the alcohol. But she’ll weather it.

Her mother opens the door and says, “I see the two of you finally figured out how to read a goddamn calendar.”

And Persephone chokes on something between a laugh and a hysterical little sob. Her mother brings her inside and sits her down at the kitchen table, just like old times. Fresh cookies, fragrant chamomile tea. Persephone wipes her nose and recounts everything as Demeter quietly listens: Eurydice, and Orpheus, and that song he brought with him.

And when the story is done, she can’t stop herself from confessing, “I’m scared, ma. What if I can’t stay sober? What if I go back and find Hadestown hasn’t changed? What if he comes early again, and we’re right back to how it used to be? What if—what if even Orpheus’ song can’t fix us?”

She is terrified of waking up one day and hearing the train whistle and knowing he ain’t kept his promises. She is terrified that one day she might cave in to the bottle and find herself slipping away again in a wreck. She is terrified that this happy ending won’t stick. That the story ain’t quite finished with her yet.

Demeter smiles sadly, and takes her daughter’s hand in hers. She says, “I’ve seen you endure that man time and time again. Age after age. You know why I still let him court you, this time around?”

Persephone shakes her head, mute.

“Because none of us know if our story is a happy one. But keeping hope that it might be is half the battle,” Demeter says, voice firm. Eyes glittering. “There is power in that hope. There is power in keeping on, because maybe, just maybe, it might turn out this time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANKS for sticking with this and finishing it! please comment if u enjoyed it!!  
As always I'm on tumblr @odyssaeus :)


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